Horror comes in a lot of flavors, and short filmmakers like to explore all of them. We’re definitely in a post-modern era of meta-horror, where the genre is a playground for subversion. Horror frameworks are twisted towards comedy, romance, or social justice, and while often funny, or creepy, or psychologically probing, their fundamental scariness is often lacking. We’ve featured over 150 horror and thriller shorts on the site, but we had a hard time coming up with this list of films that provoke genuine fear.

Why is this? Fear is deeply personal for one. For some, psychological pieces like Curve are super scary, but others prefer the auditory and visual cues of slasher films. We’re not horror experts, Chelsea is the only one in the S/W crew who is a self-styled “horror buff”, but I think that truly scary shorts hinge on a combination of atmosphere and character, and the majority of horror shorts are exercises in the former but not the latter. The films on this list tend towards the longer side, because we just don’t find jump-scare shorts all that scary. Different strokes for different folks perhaps, but after much digging here are 7 shorts from the archive that really got under our skin and which we’d not want to watch with the lights out. Happy Halloween!