Black Sugar
2013 · 11m · USA
Directed by Hank Friedmann
A group of bored suburban teens purchase a mysterious candy-colored hallucinogen from a Russian website, only to discover the drug is a living organism that traps their consciousness in a Lovecraftian nightmare ecosystem where the creatures inhabiting it can kill them for real.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A Lovecraftian premise that actually does something—treating cosmic horror as functional xenobiology instead of just aesthetics, where the drug-as-organism angle lets Friedmann demolish the tired supernatural-vs-real divide that bores everyone sensible. Most scouts would've passed on the YouTube upload and dated creature work, which is exactly why this lands.
Friedmann positions himself in a lineage of body-horror sci-fi (Cronenberg, early Carpenter) while excavating Lovecraft's obsessive documentation, creating a formally coherent nightmare where the practical FX work speaks to a deliberate conversation with 80s genre craft rather than nostalgia.
The decision to render the interdimensional space through practical creature design instead of digital abstraction—it grounds the incomprehensible in tactile, almost biological logic, and that singular commitment to practical texture is what transforms a high-concept teen-horror premise into something genuinely uncanny on a short's budget.
Reviews
Perhaps the best Lovecraftian short I've ever seen.
Part coming-of-age story, part Lovecraftian horror — a trippy take on the A Nightmare on Elm Street scenario.
Festivals
- NYC Horror Film Festival 2013, Best Short Film
- Screamfest Horror Film Festival 2013
- H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival 2014, Throne of Chaos Award
- Hollywood Reel Independent Film Festival 2014, Best Horror/Sci-Fi Short