Lane 9
2019 · 15m
Directed by Jessica Valentine, Richard Valentine
On Halloween 1979, a small town is turned upside down when a transient evil takes up residence in the local bowling alley.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Bowling alley haunting in 1979 is exactly the kind of premise that sounds like a SNL sketch until you realize the Valentines are actually playing it straight—which is either brilliantly subversive or a miscalculation, and I genuinely can't tell which yet.
The film's tonal restraint and period specificity place it in conversation with 70s genre formalism, though whether it earns that lineage depends entirely on the precision of its execution and the discipline of its editing choices.
The decision to set this in a bowling alley—a space defined by sound, repetition, and the geometry of pins and lanes—creates a visual and sonic architecture that does the atmospheric work without needing to show much of anything.