There are good shorts, bad shorts, and shorts that you’d like to have been longer, mainly because it was a cute idea. The Horrors of Autocorrect is the last of the three.
The story of a young woman (Jaquelyn Fabian) watching an old horror film (Roger Corman’s Creature From The Haunted Sea) and being disturbed by a psycho (Nick Principe) in a nice Scream style, whose text threats are sabotaged by the perils of autocorrect is a fun and amusing idea and it’s easy to see why the short has been picked up by Eli Roth’s Crypt TV.
It’s an idea that would have been nice to play out longer, with the comedy of errors continuing to absurd possibilities: a conversation that becomes more and more abstract and surreal as the autocorrect changes things organically rather than at times just to fit the resolution of the story Ie. House would become Horse etc. It’s a guess that the short isn’t longer because of budgetary restraints, but an idea would have been to get a few friends over before writing the script and really have fun texting between each other and see what absurd suggestions the phone autocorrect threw out. Imagine if Siri had got involved? The comedy potential could have been limitless!
The Horrors of Autocorrect is a fun, well made, nicely played piece, but could have been more if time or budget allowed. Even so, it’s an enjoyable short and worth the five minutes to watch. It’ll be interesting to see what the director does next.
David Paul Hellings
Twitter: @HellingsOnFilm
Images provided by author & simply legendary publicity
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