Chomp
2023 · 9m · United States
Directed by Cricket Arrison, Suki-Rose Simakis
Genres: dark comedy, horror, satire
Tones: dark, darkly comic, theatrical
A news studio becomes the breeding ground for a new kind of monster when a mysterious intern's obsession with smiling for the camera turns sinister.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A news studio monster movie that weaponizes the obsession with camera presence into actual body horror—this is the kind of subversive premise that makes you realize how little horror actually interrogates performance culture, and it's darkly hilarious precisely because it refuses to pick a lane between satire and genuine dread.
Arrison and Simakis navigate the tonal tightrope between dark comedy and institutional satire with formal control, situating themselves in a lineage of workplace horror-comedies while the theatrical restraint of the monster reveal suggests a deliberate rejection of spectacle in favor of implication.
The decision to make the intern's sinister turn a function of *smiling*—that single anatomical obsession—transforms a standard creature-feature premise into something visually specific and deeply unsettling, and that specificity of horror is what separates a gimmick from genuine craft.
Reviews
A nicely gory and twisted horror short about an awkward intern for a news show who flips her shit and goes gloriously ferocious bloodthirsty psycho during a live broadcast. Moreover, we even get a neat little twist at the end along with a wickedly funny sense of black humor.