Slimy Joe
2026 · 2m · United States
Directed by Josh Stifter
Genres: comedy, family, horror
Tones: darkly comic, humorous, whimsical
A homemade monster-puppet short in which kids playing in a pool accidentally get a little green goblin named Slimy Joe wet — and he's not supposed to get wet.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Nobody's supposed to care about a two-minute puppet getting wet, but Stifter's betting the entire bet on a single tonal gamble — treating a kids' pool accident like a genuine catastrophe — and somehow it lands as both absurd and genuinely unsettling, which is exactly the kind of genre-confused move that makes me want to champion it.
Slimy Joe understands its lineage in creature-feature comedy, yet the restraint in playing a ludicrous premise with genuine stakes feels less indebted to tradition than adjacent to it — a film that knows what it's riffing on but declines the wink.
The entire film pivots on whether we'll buy the kids' genuine panic over a puppet's fate, and Stifter's choice to stay with their performances rather than cut to Slimy Joe's reaction is what sells the whole thing — one editing decision that transforms homemade whimsy into something that actually matters.
Reviews
Here's a super fun 2-minute horror comedy short film made by filmmaker Josh Stifter. I dig this filmmaking positivity.