Suckablood
2012 · 7m · Reino Unido
Directed by Ben Tillett, Jake Hendriks
A mother curses her thumb-sucking daughter so she will never do it again, and the curse awakens a horrible creature that stalks the little girl awaiting the moment to punish her.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Most people see a cautionary tale about parenting; Tillett and Hendriks see a portal—taking the most banal domestic anxiety (thumb-sucking) and letting it summon something genuinely *wrong* from the other side. That refusal to play it straight, to let the mythology actually *matter*, is exactly the kind of subversion that makes consensus critics squirm.
The film's debt to folk-horror and curse narratives is precise and deliberate, executing the archetype with real formal control—the pacing of dread, the way the creature emerges not as jump-scare but as inevitability. It's a elegant argument about how mythology persists in the domestic, even at seven minutes.
The singular choice here is casting a child actor who can hold genuine dread without flinching—no precocious mugging, just a small body registering real supernatural terror—and that restraint is what separates this from a dozen other creature-curse shorts made on similar budgets.