The Quota
2019 · 10m
Directed by Cush
Genres: dark comedy, horror
Tones: darkly comic, tense
Lucy and Viv clean up messes for the county, and they are having a bad day. On a routine stop, the ladies are led into a very remote area by a psycho killer — and their day just got worse.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A slasher that uses sanitation workers as protagonists and plays the mundane against the murderous—most horror just defaults to final girls and jump scares, but Cush flips the whole thing by making the real horror the day job itself. This is exactly the kind of genre subversion that works because it doesn't announce itself as clever.
The tonal balance between dark comedy and genuine dread sits in a lineage of British horror-comedies that know when to cut away and when to hold—there's a formal restraint here that suggests Cush understands the grammar of genre without surrendering to it.
The decision to keep Lucy and Viv grounded in their work rhythms, treating the killer's intrusion as just another impossible thing on an impossible day, gives the whole short its singular weight—it's a choice that reframes what a slasher can be on a clearly modest budget.