“Late Nite Cinema” panelists Greg Young, Clinton Cornwell, Lily Kennedy, J.M. Kallet
Friday night, February 7, at the recently concluded Cambria Film Festival, marked the first-ever late-night block of horror shorts in its Special Shorts Program.
Even though the “Late Nite Cinema” screenings and following Q&A stopped just before midnight, the block was inspired by and had the feel of a good old-fashioned midnight movie gathering, playing to a lively, full house. It was a huge success and a significant addition to the festival.
The block was hosted with flair by flamboyant festival judge Greg Young, who invoked the tradition of Friday night midnight movies and—with some support from the audience—mentioned such classics as The Rocky Horror Picture Show and other movies that achieved cult status on the midnight movie circuit.
The reigning sentiment at the night’s conclusion was that ‘Late Night Cinema’ was a big success and a vital new addition to the still developing Cambria Film Festival.”
The block featured nine short films with the longest being 15 minutes and the shortest being four minutes. The themes, genres, and styles exhibited in these microfilms were broad, with a range that kept viewers wondering and absorbed.
Billed as “a curation of short films that are designed to thrill, chill, and showcase everything that goes ‘bump’ in the night,” the evening encompassed a much greater scope and variety of topics than this description. While the shorts did include horror and suspense, this was not a group of slash and gore flicks. They were much more reminiscent of episodes of The Twilight Zone, or perhaps even more like Rod Serling’s other almost forgotten TV show, Night Gallery—a show which used to terrify, puzzle, and even amuse me when I was a small boy of single digit age.
While there certainly was a good mix of horror and suspense in these films, there was also the straight up bizarre, from the Jamie Lee Curtis-produced Burn Out (the winner in the Late Nite category) to the laugh-inducing biting satire of White people and DEI in Vandals.
After 97 minutes of this dark and twisting cinematic trip, those who stuck around were treated to a filmmaker panel moderated by Young and featuring producer Lily Kennedy (The Corpse) and two writer-directors: Clinton Cornwell (The Haunted) and J.M. Kallet (Show and Tell).
The Haunted is a psychological and dramatic study of the effects of survivor’s guilt and grief, centering on a son and father dealing with the aftermath of losing their mother and wife whom they’d taken off life support. Here, the supernatural is blended with the psychology of grief, offering insight into the ideas of loss and “ghosts” in an achronological barrage of the son’s memories and emotions. Cornwell drew on personal experience with grief to create the film.
In Show and Tell, Kallet takes a classic scene—a couple of teen lovers at a secluded make-out point—and turns it into a shockingly different one than expected for Caleb, one of the teens (a hopeful romantic), and for the audience. The film has a detailed 1950s motif that adds to the classic teen romance and late-night movie atmosphere, and Meg, the other teen who is the object of desire, has a “trick” and an element of feminist avenger in the guise of a rockabilly dreamboat. Kallet revealed that the actual filming for this little gem was completed in one night—no small feat considering the film’s detail and polished quality.
The Corpse is one of the shortest in the block at just about four-and-a-half minutes, but it is a highly stylized film with a chilling mix of comedy and suspense. Kennedy, one of two producers of the short, emphasized how much collaborative work goes into even a very short film. All three filmmakers highlighted the importance and technical labor of post-production as well.
Other hard-to-forget entries in this block were the compelling and disturbing suburban psycho-chiller Model Citizen from director Rachael Dahl, and the wildly avant garde French film Cults, a strange look at the effects of a classic zombie film on French Catholic school boys. Even so, every entry in this block was memorable.
The reigning sentiment at the night’s conclusion was that “Late Night Cinema” was a big success and a vital new addition to the still developing Cambria Film Festival.
I urge you to catch the next installment in 2026.