[Editorial] 8 Short & Feature Horror Film Double Bills

It’s remakes month here at Ghouls Magazine, and while there’s a wealth of feature remakes, there don’t tend to be many in the short format. So I was a little stumped as to how to put together this month’s themed list of horror shorts. I considered a list of shorts that had since been made into full-length movies, but these tend not to be freely available to view (although if you loved Skinamarink as much as I did, I recommend getting yourself an extra 30 minutes of terror by watching Heck).

In the end I decided to indulge myself by picking eight of my favourite shorts, and choosing features to pair with them that would work well as a double bill. The pairs might be similar in tone, subject or style; some of the shorts are clearly influenced by their paired movie, while others predate the features. I hope you find some new favourites among these recommendations and enjoy some spooky double bills!

The Backrooms (Found Footage) (2022) and Cube (1997)

Kane Parsons’ 2022 short film The Backrooms (Found Footage) has become the most widely seen piece on the internet-based collective horror creepypasta known as The Backrooms. This sprawling mass of stories and lore began with a post of a single picture on a 4chan thread on “disquieting images”, showing an eerily bland underground room. Parsons’ film depicts a world of never-ending, repeating rooms which also contain a tangible physical threat. The similarities with Cube are clear - the seeming purposelessness of the space, the maze-like interconnected rooms, the unknown method of entry - and the near-impossibility of escape. 

Le Manoir du Diable (1896) and Nosferatu (1922)

FW Murnau’s masterpiece Nosferatu made such an impact on the horror genre, it’s hard to think of many films since that haven’t been influenced by it in some way. But even before Nosferatu there were short horror films, including Georges Méliès’ Le manoir du diable, seen by many as the very first horror film. In its three-and-a-half minutes (an ambitious length for the time), the film packs in a whole host of genre staples. There are witches, skeletons, vanishing spells, the devil himself and a particularly delightful transforming bat. It’s a fascinating look at the very earliest days of cinema and viewed alongside Nosferatu we can see the huge developments made during the infancy of the horror genre.

The Motorist (2020) and The Wicker Man (1973)

As well as both being tales of people having a very bad time in Scotland, The Motorist is full of homages to the 1973 classic. There’s a remote location, fire, effigies, ritual and even a community leader in a turtleneck and blazer combo. The action starts in the middle of an incident - there’s a body on the ground, and a man in a car surrounded by people angrily clamouring for him to leave the vehicle. He soon finds that staying put is far from a safe option, and the film descends fully into folk horror as a bizarre form of revenge is enacted upon the titular motorist.

Curve (2016) and Misery (1990)

Curve is a horror with a brutally simple premise: a woman wakes up on a concrete surface in a desolate landscape. The surface slopes down at a steep angle to a sheer drop and is curved enough to just allow her to stay in place - but this takes increasing effort. Such a minimalist film would seem to have little in common with the classic Stephen King adaptation, a dialogue-heavy film that focuses intently on the two main characters of Paul and Annie. What the two films do share is an unflinching depiction of chronic pain and discomfort. Both protagonists are isolated, immobilised and hurt - though it’s up for debate whether it would be better to be tormented by a faceless brutalist structure or the formidable Annie Wilkes.

Pictures (2015) and It Follows (2014)

It Follows became instantly iconic in 2014 with its surreal take on the slasher genre - teens being relentlessly stalked by an entity that can take on the appearance of any human. The lack of a clearly identifiable threat imbues the film with a feeling of anxious fatalism. Pictures evokes this same feeling through its uncanny premise. A woman is redecorating her home when she receives a picture of the room she’s in, which she didn’t take. As she gets more photos she realises that they show what’s about to happen, and she becomes locked in a struggle to prevent a predetermined fate. As a double bill, Pictures is an aptly paranoid precursor to the fully dread-laden horror of It Follows. 

Teaching Jake About the Camcorder, Jan ‘97 (2021) and Skinamarink (2022)

Skinamarink became one of the most talked-about recent horrors on its recent release - its extreme lo-fi, disjointed aesthetic proving divisive but extremely impactful. A feature-length fever dream, it perfectly captures the feeling of a child’s nightmare. Teaching Jake About the Camcorder, Jan ‘97 plays on the same sense of childhood fears. A video recording of a father telling his son how to use a camcorder plays again and again, but like actual memories this recording proves to be malleable, and there are hints at an unsettling reason for the compulsive rewatches. Both full of melancholy and uncertainty, these films make a perfect tonal match.

La Cabina (1972) and Funny Games (1997)

La Cabina is one of my absolute favourite short horror films. A 30-minute masterpiece, it’s a deceptively simple story of a man inexplicably stuck in a phone box. This comical situation becomes gradually more anxiety-inducing as the man’s plight becomes more serious. There’s a disturbing disconnect between the trapped man’s increasing desperation and the surrounding public’s obliviousness to his distress. Michael Haneke’s study in nihilistic bleakness, Funny Games, employs a similar disconnect of a mundane setting transforming into a site of terror - but in this case the teenage antagonists are horribly aware of the pain their actions are causing.

We Together (2016) and 28 Days Later (2002)

Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later revitalised the zombie genre at the start of the millennium, bringing fast, rage-fuelled zombies and the constant threat of being turned by the ultra-contagious virus. Much of the horror comes from the fact that the undead aren’t long-dead, shuffling corpses, but those who moments ago were ordinary people. We Together similarly focuses on the human the monster once was. It centres on one zombie - a young man who used to work in a fast-food kitchen. Part of a zombie horde besieging a building in a parking lot, he becomes transfixed by a radio that gets knocked over and starts to play music he recognises from his former life. We Together is a superb zombie film, which I believe compares in quality to some of the best feature-length films in the genre. In a tight, dialogue-free seven minutes it touches on nostalgia, friendship, and the possibility of redemption, and incorporates classic zombie gore, action scenes and dance sequences. Watch it alongside 28 Days Later for a small slice of hope to temper Boyle’s bleak vision.

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