Brooklyn Horror Film Festival Review: NIGHTMARE FUEL Horror Shorts

NIGHTMARE FUEL is 80 minutes, nine short movies, of weird. You’re left with your mouth open at the end of each one, and not in the good jaw-dropping way. There’s more confusion than scares in these shorts. The last two made up for the sheer strangeness of the previous ones. (SPOILERS AHEAD)

We start our adventure with MILK. A boy gets berated by his mother for drinking out of the carton. He pours a glass and hears his mother calling for him down the hall… only mom is in the next room. She gets scared too and the boy is stuck in the middle of the mom he can see and the other he can hear. The one from down the hall is a demon or deformed or something, its hard to tell. Then the boy turns into a baby and the glass of milk crashes. No joke, that’s the film, it’s very odd.

SPECIAL DAY is next and we’re at a girl’s 18th birthday party. Her father gives a very strange speech to the party saying how their family achieves success through a special gift. At this time the daughter hears a sort of screech outside and sees a slenderman wannabe. She learns that he is her special gift and his proximity to her equates to how much time she has left until her death: closer he is, closer death is.

The third movie, THE GIRL IN THE SNOW, was in German. We follow a man making weird noises, the classic horror movie noises. Then we see him in his basement with a girl tied to a chair. He cuts off one of her fingers and records her screams. He splices all the sounds together to make a horror score. Very out there but this one was pretty good.

We’re then transported into a bedroom where a mother is attempting to take care of her severely asthmatic daughter. She runs downstairs to find medicine and gets attacked by a demon but creates a salt circle to protect herself. She runs back upstairs and finds the daughter on death’s door, so they get in the car to go to the hospital. It starts raining while they’re in the car and the salt circle disappears. The demon lands on the hood of the car, screeches, and we fade to black. This was a good one too. This was called SALT.

WELCOME TO BUSHWICK was the next and we’re with a nervous nerdy fellow and his hot date at her house. He’s scared about his first sexual experience. At one point he gets up to refill drinks and she appears behind him with a deformed face and chases him in the bathroom where she makes a lot of animalistic noises while trying to bash the door down. He finally goes outside and sees her leaning against a wall but her lower half is facing the wrong way. WHAT!? Yep.

This one… this was far and away the weirdest. MOTHER RABBIT. A woman hallucinates a bunny person outside her room and chases it to a taxidermist’s house. She attempts too free a rabbit but ends up trapped and then let go. When she is let go, she takes the dead rabbit and spending her days and nights with it like a human. She slowly dives into madness, to the point she goes back to the guy’s, murders him, then has a candlelit dinner of the guy’s head with the rabbit.

NOSE, NOSE, NOSE, EYES! starts off with a little girl waking from a nightmare. She cries to her mother. We overhear a conversation between mother and uncle. The mother tells the daughter that uncle just wants the insurance from the fathers impending doom. The mother goes to take care of the father, so the little girl goes to investigate. She sees her father is tied to the bed and tells her to find her uncle. Mom catches the little girl just before she stabs the father in the eyes. Later the daughter goes in and sees the mother perches above the now dead father’s body. Another strange story.

BEC was probably my favorite of the collection. An old woman toting an oxygen tank around is being chased by a creepy little boy with black eyes and balloons. At one point she freaks out so bad she tries to go out the front door but just ends up back in her bedroom doorway. She vomits blood, coughs up a bug, sees a bunch of black balloons and gets dragged into her room by a demon. Weird but good.

The last story, FEAST ON THE YOUTH, is about an older sister looking for her younger sibling in the woods. When they are reunited and on their back they get separated again. The older sister runs into a creepy white fairy who bites her. She then stops the little sister from entering the fairy’s realm and they live happily ever after. This one is great, especially the couple of trippy moments.

Overall NIGHTMARE FUEL was a decent collection. All well made movies and good ideas, but there were only a few I wasn’t left totally confused and only a few that had any good scares in them. This was about a quarter tank of nightmare fuel for the tank.