Death Red
2025 · 13m · United States
Directed by Mitch Glass
A young artist acquires a forgotten can of "Death Red" — paint outlawed in 1984 after it was found to contain a serial killer's victims — believing it will fuel her masterpiece.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Death Red flips the serial killer thriller inside out by making the murder weapon a *painting medium* — it's genuinely warped, the kind of premise that makes you groan and then can't stop thinking about it. Most scouts would file this under 'horror gimmick,' but Glass leans into the absurdist contradiction hard enough that it becomes genuinely unsettling.
The film sits comfortably in a lineage of '80s body horror and paranoia thrillers, though its formal restraint — the way it lets the premise breathe rather than explode into spectacle — recalls the measured dread of early Cronenberg. It's a competent execution of a familiar tonal register, with editing that knows when *not* to cut.
The singular choice here is the decision to make the paint itself the antagonist rather than any external threat — and Glass commits to that constraint throughout, which means every compositional decision, every shot of the canvas, has to do the heavy lifting alone. That formal discipline, working against a micro budget, is what gives this teeth.
Reviews
Death Red is a 12-minute horror short film made by filmmaker Mitch Glass, his latest creation for the horror community. Another impressive horror short from Mitch – I really hope he gets to make his first feature soon, too.