It’s rare a viral internet video, even when movie-related, is worth posting for the 10,000th time but sometimes one is just too striking to pass up. In this case it’s a stunningly well-produced drive-in movie animation that goes from utterly convincing to utterly horrifying with surprising effectiveness. I don’t know what’s more amazing- how perfectly they replicated the graphic design, photography, and texture of a 50s drive-in bumper, or how well-directed the segment becomes once it begins to unravel into something terrible. The kind of horror on display here is more than just a shallow addition of violence or decadence to quaint imagery- the imagery and sound design go much deeper and touch on the horror of Lynch and Kubrick, and maybe even some De Palma and Carpenter. It’s all mashed together into something more disturbing than some of the horror films I’ve seen in theaters in recent years. That might be a bit much for a four minute online video, but it’s good work.

Check it out…

Even better is that there’s already a real-time behind the scenes video that gives you an idea how each effect was achieved, and shows how much work went in to painstakingly replicating that 50s aesthetic. The pickle set-up in particular is pretty impressive- I would have otherwise assumed that was plucked straight out of archival footage.

We here at CHUD are no strangers to turning old drive-in imagery on its head, so we can appreciate good stuff when we see it. I think I’m going to have a lot of fun digging back through all of the work of the MK12 studio that produced this.

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