Charlie the Cancelled Skeleton
2023 · 9m · USA
Directed by Joe Reilly
Genres: dark comedy, horror, satire
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, provocative
A bitter actor runs a cancellation campaign against the horror film that fired him, and the film starts cancelling him back.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Finally—a film that understands the absurdity of cancel culture by literalizing it, turning the machinery of outrage into actual supernatural revenge. This is the kind of premise that makes people uncomfortable because it refuses to pick a side, and that's exactly why it works.
Reilly's inversion of the revenge narrative shows formal sophistication—the film mirrors its protagonist's escalating hysteria through structure, though the satire occasionally tips toward the didactic rather than sustaining the elegant ambiguity one might expect from a more restrained hand.
The central conceit—that the film itself becomes an agent—hinges on a single editing choice or sound design decision that collapses the distance between the actor's internal spiral and external reality, and if that moment lands, it elevates what could've been a one-joke premise into something genuinely disorienting.
Festivals
- Apocalypse Later International Fantastic Film Festival 2023
- Terror in the Bay 2023, Best Mini-Short Film
- Utah HorrorFest 2023
- Thing in the Basement Horror Fest 2023, Best Performance (Joe Reilly as Dick Weid)