10 Horror Movies That Were Originally Short Films
John Squires
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DARKNESS FALLS
The concept of the Tooth Fairy is a pretty creepy one: a creature who comes into the bedrooms of children at night and takes their teeth in exchange for money. It was in 2001 that filmmaker Joe Harris realized the potential for horror in the idea, putting a dark spin on the bedtime story with a short film appropriately titled Tooth Fairy. Though the film ran less than five minutes, the folks over at Sony Pictures were inspired enough by the concept to expand upon the idea, hiring Harris and a few other writers to pen the screenplay for Darkness Falls. Released in 2003, the feature film marked the directorial debut of Jonathan Liebesman (Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning), and didn’t quite garner the same positive reactions that the short did.
JU-ON
Long before getting the American remake treatment, Takashi Shimizu’s Ju-on (The Grudge) began its life as two short segments in a Japanese TV anthology film called Gakko no kaidan G. Shimizu was recruited for the project based on a previous short film he had directed, tasked with helming two 3-minute segments that comprised less than 10% of the finished film. Shimizu’s contributions were titled Katasumi and 4444444444, which introduced the characters of Kayako and that creepy meowing boy, and they served as the inspiration for Ju-on: The Curse, released in 2000. Shimizu refers to the two shorts as prequels to the movies.
THE PACT
It was at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival that an 11-minute short film titled The Pact premiered – a creepy little ghost story that garnered a positive reaction from the festival crowd. Writer/director Nicholas McCarthy shot the film in only two days, based on an idea he had been tooling with for years, and he returned from the festival hopeful that he’d someday get the chance to turn the short into a feature. Exactly one year later, at Sundance 2012, McCarthy’s dreams came true and the feature length version of The Pact premiered. Now that’s a success story!
MAMA
Made in 2008 by Andres Muschietti, the short film that became 2013’s Mama was a genuinely chilling tale of two young girls who come upon a frightening apparition that they refer to as “Mama,” and it caught the attention of a filmmaker with a whole lot of pull in Hollywood: Guillermo del Toro. So impressed with the short was Del Toro that he contacted Muschietti and worked with him to turn three minutes into one hundred, coming on board to produce the expansion. As Del Toro notes in his introduction to the short, it’s one of the scariest films he’s ever seen.
THE BABADOOK
One of the most recent films to make the leap from short to feature was Jennifer Kent’s Monster, which became 2014 hit The Babadook. Running just under 10-minutes long, and made way back in 2005, Monster centers on a mother who battles her son’s fear of a monster lurking in the closet, and Kent refers to the short as “baby Babadook.” It took nearly ten years for the short to become a feature, but the wait was definitely worth it. Kent’s debut feature put her on the map in a big way, and was widely considered to be 2014’s best horror film.
If you can think of any other horror movies that were spawned from shorts, let us know!
