Super Mario: Underworld
2016 · 4m
Directed by Andrew McMurry
Genres: action, fantasy, horror
A live-action horror short about what happens to Mario, the most famous plumber in video games, when he falls into the void after missing one of his jumps on the platforms of the Mushroom Kingdom.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Finally, someone had the audacity to ask what actually *happens* in the void—not some safe nostalgia riff, but a genuine inversion of the most cheerful IP imaginable into something genuinely unsettling. This is the kind of premise that makes committee types uncomfortable, which is exactly why it works.
A technically competent inversion of gaming iconography, though the film's self-aware horror conceit reads more as YouTube pastiche than as an interrogation of any meaningful tradition—it lacks the formal rigor or thematic depth that would elevate conceptual irreverence into something lasting.
The choice to treat the fall itself as the horror rather than what awaits below it—that commitment to intimate dread over spectacle—is what sells the entire premise, even on a four-minute budget and without relying on recognizable creature design.