Short of the Week
With submissions for our Nightmare Shorts competition continuing to flood in ahead of the deadline at the end of September, we’re delighted to announce the latest addition to our competition jury: Nikyatu Jusu.
After first featuring her work back in 2020, with Suicide by Sunlight, we’ve continued to follow Jusu’s work as she transitioned her talent for genre storytelling into the world of feature filmmaking. Since then, Jusu has established herself as one of the most exciting voices working in contemporary genre cinema, making her the perfect addition to a jury tasked with finding the next generation of genre filmmaking talent.
We’re especially excited to have someone whose career we’ve been following for so long helping us navigate the incredible selection of films being submitted to Nightmare Shorts. From the very beginning of the competition, our aim has been to discover filmmakers with a distinctive voice and a fresh approach to genre and Jusu brings an invaluable perspective to that search.
Bio
Nikyatu Jusu is a writer and director whose work spans film and television. Her feature debut, Nanny, won the U.S. Dramatic Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival and was released by Amazon Studios and Blumhouse. Her short film Suicide by Sunlight premiered at Sundance and was produced through the Tribeca Chanel Through Her Lens program.
Across genre, horror, and speculative storytelling, Jusu’s work often explores displacement, power, identity, and the interior lives of Black women. She is currently developing and directing a slate of film and television projects, including the forthcoming feature Mime.
Nikyatu joins our previously announced juror Caleb Phillips, the filmmaker behind one of Short of the Week’s favourite horror shorts, Other Side of the Box. Phillips’ debut feature, Imposters, premiered at SXSW in 2026.
With submissions still open, there’s plenty of time to get your horror short in front of these experienced jurors, but the deadline is approaching faster than you think. The winner will be selected by our three-person jury and announced in early October, before being featured on Short of the Week in time for Halloween.
The final member of our jury will be announced in the coming weeks.
If you’ve made a horror – or horror-adjacent – short that you think deserves to keep audiences awake at night, we want to see it.