The Acrylic, a Thingy Award write-in candidate for best Horror Short. is available for viewing right here! That painting is just plain wrong.

Directed by Daniel James Pike

When shopping for her sparsely decorated apartment, Rosie (Athena Kaitlin Trinh) gets drawn into an art gallery and becomes enamored with a dark and hypnotic acrylic painting. It’s a highly textured all-black piece that looks like oozing paint frozen in place, like sap on a tree… or perhaps… blood? Not my first choice for art to display in my house, but you know modern art, it’s about setting a mood. Wendy German is the dubious curator who sells Rosie this painting, and she seems to know a bit more than she’s telling.

Because this is a short film, saying too much will spoil everything. Let’s just say that the painting comes with a little bit of a past. Something extra. This short reminds me of another very effective short film, The Armoire (2017), which also featured someone taking home a possessed object. This short film would make a nice short film to watch in front of the surprisingly entertaining feature Killer Sofa. Remember when movies had a short film that would play before your feature film? It still happens in film festivals. When at home make your own film festival with shorts in combination with features!

This is Pike’s first project. He wrote this, composed the music, and did the production design as well. Not a surprise for a horror short, but it goes to show that this is a labor of love project for sure. The film was the bronze winner for the Independent Shorts Awards and also a silver winner for Best Visual FX (with Rhonda Causton, the costume designer).