Sprite Fright
2021 · 11m · Netherlands
Directed by Matthew Luhn, Hjalti Hjalmarsson
Genres: animation, comedy, horror
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, humorous
A group of rowdy teenagers venture into an isolated forest where they encounter peaceful mushroom-loving sprites. When the teens fail to respect their hosts, things take a horrifying turn.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A horror-comedy wrapped in a tech manifesto that somehow pulls off both without flinching—teenagers-vs-sprites sounds like every other forest-nightmare premise until the sprites start winning in genuinely unhinged ways, and the whole thing refuses to apologize for its choppy, defiant animation style that makes it *weirder* instead of cheaper.
The film positions itself shrewdly within animation lineage—invoking '80s horror-comedy while using Blender's cutting-edge pipeline as both tool and text—but the stylized choppiness occasionally subordinates narrative clarity to technical exhibition, a trade-off that reads more as proof-of-concept than fully resolved artistic vision.
The choice to lean into that deliberately choppy animation as a *feature* rather than hide it elevates what could've been a student showcase into something genuinely unsettling; that stuttering frame rate becomes the film's tonal weapon, making even silly sprite-violence land with an off-kilter menace that smoother rendering would've killed.
Reviews
His short is riotous fun and looks great too.