No Monsters Allowed
2019 · 4m · USA
Directed by David Burgis
Tones: darkly comic, tense, whimsical
A young girl, rattled by a horror movie she watched with her older brother, can't fall asleep — and the creatures creeping into her bedroom soon get more than they bargained for. A dialogue-free stop-motion short.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects the girl to cower—instead Burgis flips the script so hard the monsters become the terrified ones, which should feel gimmicky but doesn't because the commitment to that reversal is genuinely unsettling in ways that feel earned rather than cute.
The restraint of dialogue paired with the formal precision of stop-motion miniatures places this squarely in a lineage of tactile, handmade horror—Svankmajer's DNA runs through it, but Burgis finds his own register in how the scale of the sets mirrors a child's overwhelming perspective.
The decision to hold the camera at near-floor level throughout—making the viewer *be* the child rather than observe her—transforms what could've been a clever inversion into something claustrophobic and visceral; everything hinges on that single formal choice and it never wavers.
Festivals
- East Lansing Film Festival 2019
- International Children's Film Festival Bangladesh 2020
- Melrose Film Festival 2020
- Cinema Steamboat 2020, Honorable Mention