HICKORY DICKORY DOCK
2026 · 10m
Directed by Jennifer Trudrung
Genres: dark comedy, horror, surrealism
Tones: dark, darkly comic, surreal
A woman wanders in search of playmates for demented versions of her favorite nursery-rhyme games.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A woman hunting for playmates to corrupt nursery rhymes into surreal horror — it's the kind of premise that sounds unhinged on paper and actually *commits* to the bit, refusing the easy jump-scare route for something genuinely unsettling and weird.
Trudrung positions this squarely in the lineage of folkloric body horror and carnival-inflected dread, working the nursery-rhyme tradition as both structural scaffold and semantic trap; the formal rigor required to sustain that tonal balance across ten minutes is considerable.
The film's lift lives in the choice to make the protagonist *searching* rather than already arrived — that restless momentum, the incremental degradation of the games themselves, transforms what could be a one-note concept into something that actually accumulates dread through pacing alone.
Reviews
Final Girl Presents HICKORY DICKORY DOCK A woman wanders in search of playmates for demented versions of her favorite nursery rhyme games. HICKORY DICKORY DOCK Directed by JENNIFER TRUDRUNG with DANIEL HENRY | EMILY TYNAN McDANIEL | PENNY MUNROE | JENNIFER TRUDRUNG Written by JENNIFER TRUDRUNG Produ