400 Minutes of Terror

By Steven Anderson

Short films are everywhere these days, especially on YouTube, which is home to a staggering quantity of short film. With so many options available, how can anyone tell in advance if what they're about to watch has any value? Is their only real choice to press play and hope for the best? I say no. The answer that got us through so many nights at the video store--the DVD guide--can be the answer that gets us through YouTube. Much like the Videohound guide to DVDs, "400 Minutes of Terror" looks to provide insight into the ultra-short online horror market. Focused on shorts under five minutes in duration, "400 Minutes of Terror" brings together a collection of short films that, combined, add up to a total runtime of just over 400 minutes. With a few bonuses besides, this is an excellent cross-section of some of the best in short horror. With links, ultra-short synopses and short capsule reviews, it's a complete look at some of the shortest scary movies around.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Steven Anderson
• Release date: Jul 4, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463583371

Steven Anderson

Steve Anderson was born and raised in the wilds of Michigan. Long, cold winters worked on his soul, creating a man who knew all the best things to do while hiding from weather. And when the ebook revolution arose, he took the chance to put together some science fiction--and a few other pieces he'd been working on--on the open market. He's been writing, in one capacity or another, since 2004, so he's had plenty of opportunity to gather material and put it all together. Steve currently lives in most people's retirement dream, a little house in the country.

Book preview

Have you ever run a search on YouTube for short horror film? Not so long ago, I did. You know what I got back? I got back somewhere around 527,000 results. Leaving out the quotes, meanwhile, shot that number through the roof to 136 million results. I don't have to tell you that's a lot of results, and the worst part of it is that it really only scratches the surface.

A subsequent search for scary short film brought back around 79,300 results, and though there was certainly some overlap in there, that still left a whole lot going on. Assume an average runtime of about five minutes—and given the nature of short film, which can run anywhere from a couple minutes clear into the half-hour range and beyond—and you're talking somewhere around 396,500 minutes of short film, and then some.

Break that down into days, months and beyond, and what you get is right around 275 days' worth of footage. Most of a years' worth of non-stop horror short film; no bathroom breaks, no meals, and not a moment of sleep. If you were to try and get through that you'd probably die before you got even a tenth of the way through it from sheer exhaustion.

What's more, the quality is also a serious issue. While there are some absolutely amazing short films out there, there are also plenty of amateur fodder that just can't hold a candle to it. By like token, there are works that are clearly professional-grade in their overall shooting quality that fall terribly flat in the plot and execution department, and some amateur stuff that will really put a fright in its viewer.

So the question becomes, where is the good stuff? Where are the short horror films that do the best job of being the scariest? It's hard to tell, and that got me to thinking. One of the biggest problems when it comes to online video, whether that online video is on YouTube or somewhere else, is that of discovery. It's tough to pick the good stuff out of a pile of videos that extends for 527,000 results or so in all directions, and so, perhaps the best way to solve that problem was a dose of good old fashioned film criticism.

So over the course of a good while, I sat down and started watching horror short film. Even here, I began to see problems emerge; there were so many here that I had to start inventing criteria just to figure out a place to plant my pick and start digging, so to speak. Eventually, I got to realize that if I stuck to the really short stuff, I'd have the ability to cover a lot more ground in the same amount of time. This left me somewhat melancholy, as there were a lot of exciting short films that were running in the 10 to 30 minute range, but there were so many super-short films around that I hardly went wanting for opportunity.

Thus, the standards by which this book was written: the titles covered here are limited to those five minutes long or less--exceptions are made, occasionally, for those slightly over--and combined, the films represent just over 400 minutes of runtime. Yes, that makes the book's title something of a misnomer; after all, I promised you 400 minutes of terror as represented by the title.

I prefer to think of it as less a misapplication of the name and more a value-added proposition. You came here for 400 minutes of terror. You're going to get somewhere around 402, give or take a few seconds. Of course, it's also something of a misnomer anyway; it's a fair bet that something I found scary won't resonate the same way with other viewers. That's simply the nature of the beast, though hopefully, the excess will help minimize the sting of it. You came for 400 minutes of terror, and you could have had a little more, but maybe you'll only get 400 because one short falls a bit flat.

But what this will do--even if everything you see here doesn't provide the terror I expect it to--is provide you with a great starting-off point for horror shorts. There's a world of them out there, and you've got to find a place to plant your pick and start digging, just the same as I did. The book itself is designed to be short and high-impact; consider this an introductory primer, and there are more to follow. Just as there are tons of short horror films out there, so too will there be plenty more to discuss in other versions.

However, there may be some wondering where I get off talking about