Winters Last Bones
2022 · 4m
Directed by Izabella Anguiano Jacobs
Genres: dark comedy, fantasy, horror
Tones: dark, darkly comic, surreal
After a long scarce winter, a starving witch hunts down her next unsuspecting meal.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A starving witch film sounds like every other indie horror-fantasy riff, but Anguiano Jacobs leans into the surreal and darkly comic hard enough to make the premise feel genuinely bent—this isn't trying to be scary, it's trying to be *weird*, and that's refreshing.
The tonal balance between horror and dark comedy suggests a filmmaker conscious of genre lineage, though at 4 minutes the formal rigor lives entirely in pacing and visual economy—whether that restraint serves the work or constrains it will determine if this lands as control or incompleteness.
Four minutes to make starvation and predation feel both comic and genuinely unsettling hinges on a single committed performance choice or a perfectly-placed edit; if Anguiano Jacobs nails that one decision—the witch's expression, the prey's realization, the cut between them—everything else becomes inevitable.