The Stomach
2020 · 15m
Directed by Ben Steiner
Genres: crime, horror, thriller
A spirit medium whose grotesque method of channeling the dead is endangering his own life wants out of the trade, but forces in this world and the next have other plans.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A spirit medium eating the dead to channel them is exactly the kind of grotesque premise that makes everyone else squeamish and me absolutely certain this is the only short worth watching this week—horror that actually commits to its own sick logic instead of winking at the camera.
Steiner's deployment of body horror within the crime-thriller scaffold shows clear lineage to New French Extremity and transgressive horror, though the surreal tonal shifts occasionally undercut the formal precision the premise demands.
The decision to make the channeling method *physical* rather than theatrical—grotesque, ingested, embodied—transforms what could've been standard supernatural procedural into something that lands because of that single unflinching choice about how the magic actually works.