Mary's Mixtape
2023 · 13m · UK
Directed by Sam Prim
Genres: horror, surrealism, thriller
After stealing a cassette tape, Mary develops a strange obsession with its euphoric music — until flipping to the B-side reveals the dark fate of its previous owner.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A cassette tape as a Trojan horse for cosmic dread—it's the kind of low-key premise that could've been a snoozefest in anyone else's hands, but Prim uses the B-side flip as a narrative and tonal guillotine that most horror directors wouldn't dare commit to.
The film situates itself squarely in the lineage of analog-object horror (The Ring, Ghostwatch), but with a formal restraint in pacing and sound design that recalls the European arthouse tradition—the cassette becomes both MacGuffin and memento mori.
The decision to let the music itself do the tonal pivot—moving from euphoria to dread across a single audio transition—is the kind of economical storytelling choice that makes 13 minutes feel inevitable rather than compressed.