Bits and Bytes Short Film Reviews – Blood in the Snow Film Festival 2024

Posted on by Kate DeJonge

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BITS and Bytes is a collection of short horror films screening on the third night at Blood in the Snow Film Festival 2024, including several from series that viewers will want to hunt down after viewing this sampling. Check out our reviews, and find some new favourite creators to follow!

Ezra (2022)

“After fleeing the dark and demonic chains of his shadowy old home, Ezra, a killer gay vampire, takes a leap of faith and enters the modern world.”

Creator and co-director Luke Hutchie presented Ezra, a short film about a catty, 400-year-old vampire (Ezra, played by Luke Hutchie) enrolled at Wood Cress University to make his life more interesting. He meets and befriends the equally catty Gwen (Daniella Dela Pena), and the two spend their days giving their professors a hard time and being mean to classmates. Every time Ezra goes to the bathroom, he has a rendezvous with a new young man and kills him brutally. There is never any question about the messes left behind in the stalls or missing young men; who knows if even Gwen suspects him of being a vampire. It sounds a bit like a YA supernatural comedy, and it turns out it is! There are 10 episodes of Ezra available on Out TV, and according to the reviews, people are obsessed with this show! The writing is fantastic and the acting is on point. Imagine the ballsy confidence of Matthew Broderick in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986), upgraded into a modern gay teen with the pent-up sarcasm of a 400-year-old vampire. 

Catch episode one, Ezra, at the Blood in the Snow Film Festival, and get ready to subscribe to Out Tv to watch the rest of the series!

Papa Guillotine (2023)

Papa Guillotine

“In a post-apocalyptic world, Anna’s life and work are dominated by her father Sylvestre, a short-tempered mechanic with a terrible reputation for tearing the head off anyone who dares cross him. He decides she’s old enough to follow in his footsteps, much to her dismay. To prove herself, she must now decapitate her first victim. Can she find a way to defy fate?”

Papa Guillotine screened under the title Head Shop for the BITS 2024 festival, in French with English subtitles. This is a surprisingly dark series of quick shorts that could easily be compiled into one feature-length film. Set in the nearly abandoned city of Montreal in the year 2035, the permafrost has melted and most of the population has fled the area. Syl (Emmanuel Auger) and his daughter Anna (Laurie Babin) remained, to run an auto shop that will only fix cars deemed acceptable by Syl. In a world where the air is so polluted that new cars are forbidden, anyone who brings him something “offensive” gets decapitated…by hand. Syl literally twists their heads off their shoulders…and stores them on shelves in his garage…with candles. The whole thing is so dark, so bleak, and it feels possible that this could happen just 10 years from now, given the state of the world. 

Everything about Papa Guillotine is brilliant. Auger plays a stern psychopath, with a palpable rage that swims beneath the surface  just before he erupts. Babin is quiet but not timid, and entirely believable as a child who has grown up under severe circumstances, alone with her psychopathic father. The heads lining the shelves in the garage are just background decoration to her. Writer Jason Todd and director Namai Kham Po normalize the horrors going on in the shop by paying almost no attention to them, and focusing on the drama between Anna and her father, instead. There are no jump scares or excess gore, just a father carrying out his business as he sees fit, and that’s okay with everyone around him. It’s an entirely plausible dystopia, which is terrifying enough. 

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The Last Sonata (2024)

Last Sonata

 

“Emilie, a celebrated cellist with a terminal illness, moves into a secluded house to finish her opus in peace, but the more she tries to shut herself away from the world, the more she finds herself haunted by powerful, enigmatic forces.”

Originally released as episode 10 of the Creepy Bits series, director Ashlea Wessel’s film The Last Sonata is a poignant look at death and the beauty of nature. Emilie Rathburn (Penny Phang) returns to her countryside estate to finish composing a cello sonata in the last days of her life. Her assistant Arthur (Daniel Entz) worries over her, making sure she takes her medication and remembers to eat, but he remains in Emilie’s peripheral vision while she obsesses over her sonata. When she arrives, she is frustrated, but determined. Flocks of screeching birds flying overhead are a distraction, but Emilie doubles down and drives her focus even deeper. As her health continues to fail, the birds and animals around her house creep ever closer, throwing themselves against her windows and crawling through cracks in the walls. Vines begin to sprout inside and quickly take over the house, but Emilie plays on, perfecting her sonata.

When she doesn’t answer text messages from Arthur after her heart monitor sends him an alert, he rushes to her side with a bouquet of flowers, some food, and a reminder that she’s not dead yet. He advises her to go outside, pay attention to nature, and enjoy it while she still can. What follows is equally beautiful and heart-wrenching. 

Wessel excels at using clever devices to quietly pull her audience in without making it obvious that she is doing so, like a whisper that beckons the listener to lean in. With tight shots and subtle audio nuances, Wessel has us exactly where she wants us when The Last Sonata ends. This is a beautiful film that should win some awards in the festival circuit this season. 

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Whistle in the Woods (2024)

Whistle in the Woods

From Francesco Loschiavo’s series Tales From the Void comes this episode, Whistle in the Woods (2024). Tales From the Void is an episodic horror anthology based on stories shared to the subreddit r/NoSleep. 

In Whistle in the Woods, awkward middle schooler Nola Toles (Anna Mirodin) befriends the new girl Sawyer (Molly Lewis), but it quickly becomes apparent that they come from totally different worlds. Sawyer is a loud-mouthed impetuous brat, and Nola is a rule-following good girl. When Sawyer shows up at the Toles house for the first time, Mrs. Toles (Cara Pifko) keeps an eye on her and makes it known that she doesn’t approve of this new friendship. Not to be dissuaded, though, Sawyer returns to the Toles house at midnight and insists that Nola let her in for a sleepover. Sawyer wants to tell ghost stories (of course), but she gets more than she bargained for when Nola’s story turns out to be true. 

At its root, Whistle in the Woods is a Native North American folk tale about a Wendigo, but co-writers Travis Brown, John Thomas Kelley and Francesco Loschiavo take it one step further to highlight what can happen when a child feels like their parents don’t care about them. Sawyer repeatedly answers Mrs. Toles’ questions about her parents with blunt statements about them not caring where she is, but when the shtf, she jumps into Mrs. Toles’ arms for protection. 

With a longer runtime than most of the shorts in this festival, Whistle in the Woods had a lot of time to tell its tale, but it kept up the pace from start to finish. With a descent cast of child actors at the helm, this short is sure to be a fan favourite. 

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We watched the Dark Visions block of shorts at Blood in the Snow Film Festival 2024

More Film Festival Coverage