Secret Menu Beauty Pageant
2024 · 15m · USA
Directed by Frankie Campisano, SG Egan
Tones: absurdist, dark, darkly comic
Set in rural North Carolina, this experimental short satirizes late-stage capitalism's grip on childhood through imagery of abandoned shopping malls, fast food, and basement beauty pageants. It depicts the absurd and insidious ways consumer culture targets children.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Campisano and Egan turn a basement beauty pageant into a genuinely unsettling indictment of how capitalism colonizes childhood — the horror register is earned, not borrowed.
Abandoned malls, basement pageants, capitalism eats children — every art-school thesis since 2014 has filed this exact short. Found-space aesthetics are not a substitute for an argument.
Campisano and Egan find genuine disorientation in their found-space rural North Carolina mise-en-scène — late-capitalism childhood satire with an outsider-art texture. More committed than most of its lo-fi-horror peers.
Festivals
- Burbank International Film Festival 2024
- Buffalo International Film Festival 2024
- Pack Comedy Festival 2024