The horror genre has seen a bit of a resurgence lately, not just at the box office, but also when it comes to indie filmmakers. And this new short film from Crypt TV is one of the best examples of this modern creative renaissance we’ve seen.
The roughly six-minute short, called Kinderfänger — which is German for “child snatcher” — begins with a search party looking for a missing child in the wilderness; the latest in a series of disappearances. One of those searching is a young hearing-impaired girl, who’s the sister of the missing boy. She eventually wanders away from the group and finds her brother, along with all of the other missing children, outside a cave where they’re all under a trance induced by the flute-playing of a demonic Pied Piper-esque entity. The girl’s disability ends up being the perfect foil for the Pied Piper’s auditory spell, but the inventive short still packs in an amazing twist that you will 100 percent not see coming. Check it out below.
The short is great at setting a creepy tone, and we think it shows some potential for what the It remake could have been had it focused more on pure horror and less on humor and its coming of age tale (not that we didn’t like It — it was great, just not nearly as frightening as it could have been). Here’s hoping for more creepy films like this in the near future, and some please get the director a feature-length deal immediately.
