I always love to see inspiration strike, but especially in the short form.  Its effects seem to be more immediate and to occur in higher concentration—after all, there's no time, and often no money, to come up with ways to dilute them.

Matthew Byrne's The Wake, a 2007 film produced and directed with an extremely sharp eye, is a good example.  Throughout its less-than-twenty-minutes of run time The Wake uses a simple, largely wordless, and almost Bressonian filmic language to create a sense of pure, mounting horror.  We see a parade of medium-close shots of objects as well as faces that are often less expressive, and intentionally so, than the objects.  We see hands.  We see a bell.  We see hands tying rope.  We see a boy bound, but not struggling.  Slowly the images link to form what is definitely a narrative although we still aren’t quite sure what kind of story we're being told.  The cumulative effect is an atmosphere of dread that you might find in a vintage Theodore Sturgeon story—the film manages to be creepily elliptical and to provide concrete shocks at the same time.  With its somewhat minimalist musical score adding to the tension, The Wake works exceedingly well on a level that is uncommon in horror today:  the overtly symbolic.

At the risk of making a facile comparison, Tobias Suhm's Voigtkampff displays a sensibility and an approach to narrative that in many ways lies at the opposite end of the spectrum.

  Instead of featuring a unity of location and mood as The Wake does, Voigtkampff is a phantasmagoric riff on violent cinema itself that seems to take place in a mindspace that may in fact belong not to one of its characters, but to all of us who are currently dwelling deep inside twenty-first century pop culture.  I'm not sure what writer/director Suhm had in mind with the title of his film, but the content certainly connects to the same-named device from Blade Runner (1982) that helps distinguish authentic human beings from imposters.  As if administering that test to the audience, Suhm presents a series of loosely-connected vignettes that seek to push our more primal buttons—but he does so in such an upfront way that the effect is disarming.  Although there is a story to Voightkampff, don’t expect a plot per se; the movie runs too much on high-octane dream logic for that nicety.  As opened-ended and free-flowing in its feel as The Wake is tight and controlled, Voightkampff variously recalls machinima, experimental art house flicks, and Hong Kong shoot 'em ups.  In some sense this shifting stylistic landscape serves to showcase Suhm's wide-ranging talents, which may have been one of his intentions here.  Although I believe he has worked primarily as an editor, on the strength of Voigtkampff one can imagine him finding lasting success as a production designer or producer as well as, obviously, a director.

Neither The Wake nor Voigtkampff makes use of today's trendiest elements in horror.  Neither relies on irony or cops out on the genre.  Neither could ever spawn sequels or TV shows.  But both expect a little more from the audience and, in their creativity, reveal the vast potential for true art that can still be found in the horror genre.