The Lake
2020 · 6m · United States
Directed by Joey Greene
Genres: fantasy, horror, thriller
When a young man takes his girlfriend out on a man-made lake notorious for fatalities to propose, they come face to face with the dark spirits beneath the surface.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The setup reads like a dozen other 'cursed location' shorts, but Greene's commitment to treating a man-made lake—fundamentally artificial, fundamentally mundane—as genuinely haunted is admirably perverse; most filmmakers would've chosen somewhere with actual history to hide behind.
A competent descent into folklore horror that understands its debts to folk-dread cinema, though the surreal tonal shifts feel somewhat unmoored from the formal rigor that would elevate this beyond a well-executed premise.
The decision to shoot the spirits not as conventional apparitions but as distortions in the water's surface itself—a purely optical effect rather than creature design—does more atmospheric work than a six-minute budget has any right to, and it's what makes the proposal scene genuinely unsettling.