Evil Grows in the Dark
2019 · 10m · USA
Directed by Erin Vassilopoulos
Genres: comedy, drama, experimental
Tones: surreal, tender, whimsical
Two kids in an apartment building try to verify the rumor that a witch lives upstairs. The camera moves at the speed and logic of a seven-year-old's brain.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Childhood-horror shorts usually condescend to the kids; Vassilopoulos films inside their logic instead of about it. The witch is real because they say she is, and that's the whole movie.
Vassilopoulos builds the editing and camera rhythm to mimic herky-jerky child cognition — Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are sensibility with Martelian child POV. Formal commitment to the seven-year-old brain is the gambit.
Editing and camera rhythm built to mimic herky-jerky child cognition for two kids verifying the witch-upstairs legend — that's the rare children's-POV piece that commits at the form level, not just the content level. Lucrecia Martel for kids is a real reach.