A Time Loop, a Killer Tree and a Suicidal Puppet: Inside Cindependents Strange Side

Fantastic Fest spent September showing one version of where horror is headed. Back in Ohio, a festival that doesn’t even call itself a horror event was quietly offering another.

The Cindependent Film Festival is an all-genre program based in Cincinnati. It held in-person screenings at Memorial Hall and the Mariemont Theatre, then streamed every official selection online from September 17 through September 30. I covered it virtually from Austin. Its genre work is scattered across Off Kilter selections, animation, drama and a Saturday night After Dark lineup, and it’s smaller, stranger and harder to categorize than most dedicated genre slates.

Still Ohio: Stuck at the Pump

Kaylin Allshouse’s debut takes something close to a regional joke and turns it inside out. Ana (Fernanda Lopez) is headed to school in Louisiana to rescue a long-distance relationship. She rides south with three friends of her boyfriend who turn out to be closer to strangers. Somewhere in Ohio every road leads back to the same gas station, and every return gets worse. Allshouse’s director’s statement on FilmFreeway opens with “Becoming an adult is terrifying,” which tells you the loop is meant to carry a coming-of-age story as well as the scares. The best time-loop horror, like Triangle, ties the repetition to whatever a character refuses to face.

Published response has mostly been warm. James Melville at Rooster Illusion wrote that the station grows “more decrepit” with each loop and that the violence “is sparing and all the more impactful as a result.” He also credited Allshouse with “turning financial constraints into strengths,” which counts for a lot on a feature FilmFreeway lists at $100,000. Letterboxd is more divided. Viewers there praise the color and lighting, and some find the dialogue and character logic thinner than the craft around them.

Either way, a film shot entirely in Ohio, per ABC6, understands that a gas station at night is about as Ohio as purgatory gets.

After Dark

The After Dark block ran at 8 p.m. on Saturday, September 19 at Memorial Hall. It had seven shorts and almost nothing in common tonally.

Mary Is Missing is the heaviest entry and the most formally ambitious. A care worker vanishes from the Yellow Tree Day Service, and Detective Foley’s witnesses give accounts that contradict each other and drift toward the fantastical. Director Aisling Byrne developed it with Run of the Mill, an Irish company working with learning disabled artists. She told Film Ireland that “everything within it came from something in improvisation.” The film’s real subject is credibility. It turns the question of whose story gets believed into the mystery itself, and that’s what holds the premise together. Film Ireland reports it won the Oscar-qualifying Grand Prix for Best Irish Short at Cork.

My Black Is Cracking isn’t horror, and it doesn’t need to be. Bianca D. Lambert’s animated short follows Danni, a woman in her thirties fighting chin hairs, lines and the expectation baked into “Black don’t crack.” Its slot in After Dark says a lot about how Cindependent reads genre: bodily discomfort counts here as much as monsters do.

Ape Shit runs 2 minutes and 57 seconds. Dahlia Jane Kressler made the stop-motion short at the Aardman Academy’s Gas Ferry Studio in Bristol. Two monkeys crash-land on a planet of dodo birds, and coexistence is the only open question. At three minutes it needs a setup, a turn and an exit, and that’s all it attempts.

Meeting Your Maker is one of the most decorated shorts in the program, and it left Cincinnati with Cindependent’s Best Director award for Gregory J.M. Kasunich. Otis is a children’s show puppet whose existential crisis hits as the series nears its 300th episode. Jonathan Kite plays the puppeteer and voices Otis, with Amanda Maddock as lead puppeteer. A suicidal puppet is a one-liner, and the whole film is a bet that it can become more than one. That means making Otis emotionally credible as someone burned out on the thing that made him, while keeping the children’s-TV absurdity intact. Horror has a long, sweaty history with puppets, from Magic to the all-puppet slasher short HEAD. This one turns the dread inward, toward burnout and the gap between a performer and the thing he made.

The Taking Tree is D. Edward Lemmink’s roughly seven-minute splatter comedy about a wicked tree terrorizing passersby until one man steps up to end its bloody killing spree. The practical effects are by Jais and Tess Sardo, and the short is built for a loud, laughing room. There’s no hidden thesis in the tree. Sometimes the tree just kills people.

Picture Taker moves the block into noir. Cincinnati filmmaker Joe Zappa casts David Andrew James as a private eye who finds the same man in every photograph he’s ever taken. It’s the hometown entry, nominated for Cindependent’s Ohio Watershed Short Film Award, and its awards came from elsewhere: Festigious gave it six prizes in July, including Best Cinematography for Benjamin McClain. Published response has been much more consistent about the film’s visual strengths than about its narrative payoff. A mystery this clean promises an answer, and a noir mood can only carry the question so far before the explanation has to land.

The Intimacy Coordinator is the darkest character study in the program. Kate’s job is protecting performers’ boundaries, and Kate is also a sex addict. Louisa Connolly-Burnham wrote, directed and stars, opposite Kieron Moore. She told 1883 Magazine that “we don’t really see women as predators, despite it being a real issue.” The film isn’t about intimacy coordination as a profession. It’s about one person hollowing out a job built to protect people, and the horror sits in how much access that job gives her. Published response has been less unanimous about the ending. Sebastian Zavala at Loud and Clear argued the final twist “doesn’t really work.” Connolly-Burnham’s Best Actress nomination at Cindependent is the least surprising thing about it.

The Verdict on Cindependent’s Genre Slate

Cindependent hasn’t secretly become a horror festival. Its strength is that it doesn’t seem interested in policing the border. A time loop, a family short, a missing-person mystery bent toward fantasy, an animated fight with aging, stop-motion apes, a burned-out puppet, a killer tree, supernatural noir and a predator hiding inside a safety job all share a program because each of them sits a little crooked.

That philosophy has a cost. After Dark’s register lurches hard, from a three-minute monkey gag to twenty minutes of sexual predation, and anyone who came for a horror night gets a mood board instead. For a regional festival that trade is worth making. Films like Picture Taker and The Taking Tree could easily vanish under the volume of the big genre festivals. Here they sit next to Oscar-qualifying international work without apology. Cindependent’s genre programming works because it trusts that discomfort is a broader category than fear.