Cypress
2014 · 8m · USA
Directed by Anthony Aguiar
Genres: drama, horror, mystery
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
A dialogue-free, genre-hopping ghost story: a man filming the wilderness with a Super 8mm camera in the autumn of 1979 discovers a mysterious phenomenon in the woods.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A ghost story that refuses to announce itself as one—dialogue-free, genre-agnostic, shot on Super 8 in 1979—is exactly the kind of premise that makes consensus uncomfortable, and Aguiar executes it with enough restraint that you're never sure what you're supposed to be afraid of.
Aguiar situates himself squarely in the lineage of American folk-horror and experimental documentary, where formalist restraint becomes the engine of dread; the considered absence of explanation is itself a craft choice that reads like a silent-era meditation on cinema's relationship to the uncanny.
The Super 8 stock itself is the decision—that particular grain and color temperature doesn't just evoke 1979, it *becomes* the medium through which the mystery registers, turning the camera's limitations into the film's entire atmospheric argument.
Reviews
Shot in the true spirit of an indie production with a tiny crew and minimal gear, Anthony Aguiar's short film Cypress slowly reveals itself to be a ghost story that's hard to pin down as it traverses genres as the narrative unfolds.