Grandpa: The Horror
2023 · 15m
Directed by Bethany Dwyer
Genres: dark comedy, fantasy, horror
Tones: dark, darkly comic, surreal
A widowed grandfather will go to any lengths — even costing an innocent soul — to bring his dead wife back.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A grandfather-as-dark-necromancer premise that most scouts would file under 'cute indie horror' and move on—but Dwyer leans into the genuinely unsettling math of it, where grief and monstrosity aren't metaphors but literal transaction. The surrealism doesn't soften the horror; it sharpens it.
Dwyer situates herself in a lineage of folk-horror and body-horror cinema while maintaining a brittle darkly comic tone that recalls early Jarmusch; the editing rhythms between tender memory and grotesque ritual suggest formal control beyond the 15-minute runtime's apparent constraints.
The masterstroke here is the tonal pivot—where the film commits to the grandfather's agency rather than punishing him as a cautionary figure, and that single narrative choice reframes everything from sentiment into something genuinely strange and unsettling on a micro-budget.