The Rotting of Casey Culpepper
2022 · 14m · United States
Directed by Daniel Slottje
Genres: drama, horror, thriller
A girl battling leukemia and her single father spiral into paranoia when she begins having visions of a tumor-covered creature.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise wants to be cosmic body horror, but it settles for grief-as-metaphor—which is exactly the kind of safe, literalist choice that makes horror boring; I'd rather watch Slottje fail at something actually weird than succeed at this.
Slottje positions himself within a lineage of disease-as-psychological-rupture that traces back through Cronenberg and Lynch, and the formal control here—the way surrealism and domestic realism unspool without announcing themselves—shows real craft awareness.
The entire film hinges on that creature design and how Slottje commits to it visually without flinching or over-explaining, which transforms what could've been a tired metaphor into something tactile and genuinely unsettling on a shoestring.