Drudge
2013 · 8m
Directed by Kheireddine El-Helou
A young couple's romantic night in turns into a fight for their lives when a masked killer armed with mechanical gadgets comes for them.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A masked killer with *mechanical gadgets* stalking a couple in their home sounds like generic slasher pablum, except El-Helou treats it like a Cronenberg fever dream — the gadgetry isn't window dressing, it's the film's weird nervous system, and it makes the whole thing feel wrong in exactly the right way.
Formally, this sits in uneasy dialogue with the home-invasion tradition (Creed, Funny Games), but it resists the philosophical interrogation those films demand, instead leaning into the gadgetry as pure formal spectacle — a choice that's either refreshingly uncommitted or frustratingly shallow.
The decision to make the killer's tools *mechanical* rather than blunt or bladed fundamentally changes the film's rhythm and visual language — each attack becomes a kind of grotesque choreography, and that one formal choice lifts what could've been a 2013 YouTube short into something architecturally distinct.
Reviews
It is short films like Drudge that remind me how powerful and important horror shorts can be. To put it simply, I was in awe throughout the whole 9 minutes of its runtime.