House of Straw

The scouts

Here's the thing everyone's doing right now—taking a recognizable domestic crisis and bolting genre onto it like a late-act twist—but Bogart actually commits to the absurdity: a werewolf marriage counselor film that refuses to wink at the camera. It's the kind of premise that should collapse under its own contradiction, and the fact that it doesn't is exactly why it works.

The film engages seriously with the formal problem of collapsing intimate drama and body-horror mythology, a tension that recalls both Cronenberg's domestic unease and the kitchen-sink naturalism of '70s relationship cinema; the craft lies in never letting either register overwhelm the other.

What sells it is the sound design—the way Bogart uses the ambient dread of a normal argument (the pause before a response, the refrigerator hum) to do the horror work instead of relying on jump cuts or music cues, making the transformation feel less like spectacle and more like what was always underneath.

Reviews

This is an impressive little short that shows quite a bit of promise not only with the story but also the production. A feature version of this is already in the works.