NOXIOUS
2024 · 4m · Netherlands
Directed by Kay Hilman
Genres: animation, horror, sci-fi
Tones: contemplative, dark, melancholic
A haunting exploration of a world reclaimed by nature, created in Blender with a hand-drawn illustrative style, imagining an impressive but terrifying new lifeform that has decided to claim our planet for itself.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A digital organism consuming the world should feel transgressive, but Hilman's melancholy hand-drawn rendering plays it straight—lush and mournful instead of genuinely unsettling, which is the safe move and probably why it works.
The formal restraint here is notable: a 4-minute animation that resists spectacle in favor of mood, situating itself in the lineage of sci-fi cinema that finds horror in ecological transformation rather than action.
The crucial choice is the illustrative hand-drawn overlay on procedural 3D geometry—that friction between the organic and computational creates the actual dread, and it's the decision that makes a technically competent concept feel genuinely haunting.
Reviews
Created in Blender with a hand-drawn illustrative style, it imagines a impressive but terrifying new lifeform that has decided to claim our planet for itself. The music and sound design by Mikael Umarov helps set the mood.