/HAAW/
2025 · 11m · Array
Directed by Joey Scoma
Genres: dark comedy, horror, sci-fi
Tones: darkly comic, surreal, tense
Two snowboarders board a ski gondola and find themselves sharing it with a bizarre family — dressed in vintage '80s ski gear, expressionless, with large black eyes — who communicate exclusively through a single sound: 'HAAW.' When Brett, the xenophobic snowboarder, mocks and provokes the family, things escalate in darkly comedic and horrifying fashion.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Snowboarders share a gondola with a vintage-ski-gear alien family that only says "HAAW" and the xenophobe triggers the horror. Confined-space premise that's actually a premise — Best Midnight Short for a reason.
Tribeca, Palm Springs, Telluride Horror, Sydney Underground and Best Midnight Short at Filmquest — the festival record is impressive, and the gondola-as-pressure-cooker conceit with xenophobia as engine is genuinely Twilight Zone in spirit. A capable midnight selection.
Tribeca + Palm Springs + Telluride Horror + Filmquest Best Midnight Short — the festival run on the Vimeo page is the strongest in this batch, and the gondola-as-set, single-syllable-as-language constraints are the kind of conceptual discipline that makes contained horror sing. 11:44, 55K views, mature-tagged.
Reviews
A too-good-to-be-true semi-perfect anxiety-inducing science-fiction horror comedy short.
The ability to move through waves that shift the audience's sympathies — even if we don't understand or even recognize these creatures, we can still have empathy for them.
A clever exploration of xenophobia and fear of the unknown that transforms from horror-comedy into darkly humorous cosmic vengeance. Director masterfully uses awkward silences and claustrophobic confined spaces to build tension.
writer/director Joey Scoma cleverly uses genre elements to craft an engaging narrative that is simultaneously entertaining, while having an unexpected depth. Scoma uses all the filmmaking tools at his disposal — from cinematography to his own editing, which moves the tension from awkward to threatening.
Festivals
- Tribeca Festival 2025
- San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM) 2025
- Palm Springs International ShortFest 2025