How To Make A Ghost
2023 · 14m · USA
Directed by Jared Hogan
Tones: dark
On Halloween night, a group of bored teenagers dare one boy to hide in the back seat of a stranger’s car and scare the driver when they return. What starts as a harmless prank rapidly spirals into something far more dangerous and disturbing.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Halloween-prank-gone-bad with an unresolved ending. Grounded-horror-no-supernatural is the new supernatural — every other film at every festival ends on the unresolved-ending dare. Hard to muster much.
A grounded Halloween-prank-gone-wrong premise that refuses supernatural relief — Hogan is signaling restraint, and the deliberately unresolved ending is the right ambition. Whether it earns its fourteen minutes I cannot say from the page, but the discipline is promising.
Grounded reality-based horror that refuses supernatural elements AND refuses closure at 14 minutes — that's a discipline most genre shorts can't sustain. A Halloween-prank Trojan horse for moral chaos works only if the ending earns the withholding.
Reviews
This eerie and disquieting narrative serves as a stark reminder that some of the most profound horrors are rooted in reality, as Hogan expertly delves into our primal fears, crafting a suffocating short film that lingers in your thoughts and refuses to relinquish its grip long after that final frame.
Festivals
- Hollywood Shorts Fest 2023, Best Short Film
- Panic Fest 2023