Dead Northern Short Cuts – Gumboro, Dogs Reign and The Tall Dark Man

Short films have always been a vital part of genre festivals, giving filmmakers the chance to make an impression in minutes rather than hours and audiences the opportunity to discover emerging talent, strange new ideas and stories that might not play by feature-length rules. At Dead Northern 2026, there are plenty of them waiting in the darkness.

With the festival bringing filmmakers and horror fans back to York for another weekend of genre cinema, Love Horror is getting to know some of the people behind this year’s shorts with Dead Northern Short Cuts, our series of quick-fire conversations with the filmmakers and stars bringing their work to the festival.

For our first instalment, we’re opening a door that perhaps should have remained closed in Dimitris Vavatsis’ psychological thriller Gumboro, confronting some very human monsters in Axel Zeltser’s Dogs Reign, and discovering why hiring a supernatural hitman might not be the perfect solution to your problems in Taylor Phillips’ The Tall Dark Man.

Dimitris Vavatsis – Gumboro

Moving out for the first time should represent independence and a new beginning, but Gumboro quickly finds something altogether more unsettling lurking behind that milestone.

The psychological coming-of-age thriller follows Michalis as he settles into a new home that initially appears ideal. There’s just one problem: the storage room door won’t open. From there, his relationship with a mother who never quite steps back and a series of increasingly troubling events begin to turn his newfound independence into something considerably more claustrophobic.

Who are you and why are you heading to Dead Northern 2026?

I am Dimitris Vavatsis and I am the director of the short thriller Gumboro.

This film is about a man who moves to a new house where one door is totally closed. Our story is about his relationship with his mother, his steps forward and his fears of the unknown. It’s a story about a man in modern society.

We are happy to be part of the festival because I knew about Dead Northern some years ago, its programme, the quality of the screenings and its content. So here we are!

Tell us about what it was like to be part of this production.

To be part of this production was an extremely high-level experience for me. There were a lot of difficulties.

We had to make the house and two apartments look totally the same for the scenes involving the ‘normal’ house and the nightmare maze. Our team worked for many, many hours to achieve the result we wanted.

Another big and memorable part was the pigeons. We had a wrangler to manage their movements and behaviour. That was the most difficult and interesting experience, and it was really horror for us!

What part of seeing your film at Dead Northern are you looking forward to most?

I am looking forward to the reactions of the viewers and the comments after the screening. I like the horror community and want to be part of this.

Axel Zeltser – Dogs Reign

Social drama collides with horror in Dogs Reign, which follows Lea, a young deaf woman who reluctantly accepts an invitation from two persistent men despite already feeling uneasy about the situation. As the night progresses, their intentions become increasingly difficult to decipher and the atmosphere steadily grows more threatening.

The short tackles sexist and sexual violence and the toxic male behaviours that society can excuse or normalise, using supernatural horror to give form to the things that can otherwise remain unseen, unspoken or deliberately ignored.

Who are you and why are you heading to Dead Northern 2026?

I am a screenwriter, director and editor. In Dogs Reign, I examine masculine norms and the normalised behaviours that stem from them, delivering an intense and hard-hitting horror story. As a man, this was also an opportunity for me to question masculinity and the insidious mechanisms associated with it.

I believe monsters live among us: they exist within human nature and within the societal values that blame victims, downplay assaults and normalise sexual violence.

This was a self-produced project, and the shoot lasted five days, an incredibly short timeframe given everything we had to accomplish, including prosthetics, set design, lighting and special effects. We had to make radical choices to get it all done within that window. The entire crew was extraordinary, and I hope the final result does justice to their hard work.

Being selected for Dead Northern is a truly great reward. It validates everyone’s hard work.

Tell us about what it was like to be part of this production.

Being part of Dogs Reign was a very special and deeply rewarding experience for me. The atmosphere on set was both intense and exciting, and I loved working with the entire team. Everyone was incredibly committed to the project, and it was truly inspiring to see so much care and creativity being put into bringing this story, which means a lot to me, to life.

Creating some of the film’s practical effects was one of the most challenging parts of the project, but also one of the most fun. I had a pretty clear idea of what I wanted to achieve with the different practical effects, but none of it would have been possible without Mélissa Landron and the entire team at Bel Air Atelier. It’s honestly crazy to see what they managed to create with the limited amount of time they had.

And then there were the actors, who gave so much to the project. Chiara, for example, spent nearly five hours in make-up for her character and, despite that, she performed her own stunts. Sometimes certain prosthetics or accessories would fall off or move during a scene, forcing us to stop and do another take, but she remained incredibly committed throughout. She was truly impressive.

Julien C. and Julien L. also performed their own stunts, and it was amazing to see how much they gave to the film. They were all incredibly impressive.

The shoot meant even more to me because, before I could even make it happen, I had to postpone it three times for health reasons. At some point, I started wondering if I was ever going to be able to shoot this film at all. That’s also why the film is what it is today: because of all these people who believed in the project and never gave up on me.

Thanks to them, I learned so much, both technically and creatively, and above all, I had the chance to work with incredibly talented people. Honestly, they were all just way too good. I’m truly grateful that I got to bring this project to life.

What part of seeing your film at Dead Northern are you looking forward to most?

I can’t wait for the film to be seen at one of the best genre festivals in the world, and I hope the audience will appreciate it!

Taylor Phillips – The Tall Dark Man

Be careful what you summon. That’s the lesson waiting for Natalie in The Tall Dark Man, a horror-thriller that turns to local legend for its particularly dangerous solution to a very human problem.

At her wits’ end over a blackmailing ex, Natalie summons a mythical hitman known only as the Tall Dark Man to dispose of him. But when the murder goes horribly wrong, Natalie suddenly finds herself targeted by the very evil she called upon.

Who are you and why are you heading to Dead Northern 2026?

My name is Taylor Phillips and I’m the writer/director of the horror-thriller short film The Tall Dark Man.

I designed the film to be a suspenseful audience experience meant for the cinema, even though shorts are mostly seen online these days, so I’m grateful that festivals like Dead Northern provide an exciting venue for shorts. They put on such a wonderful festival in a beautiful cinema and bring together really lovely film fans, so I just can’t wait for the crowd to get to see the twists and turns on the big screen.

Tell us about what it was like to be part of this production.

The film was a labour of love that I shot with a small, talented crew that worked really fast and hard in the farmlands of Petaluma, CA, not far from where I grew up. I wrote it initially as an exercise in Hitchcockian suspense, and then populated the murder-gone-wrong plot with iconography from my love of horror and noir films, books and comics, like the old EC Comics and Universal horror films of the 1930s.

We gave the titular killer a sort of gothic, Night of the Hunter quality to add a supernatural feel to the film, and the actor Aion Boyd brought him to life in a really unique and haunting way.

Our amazing lead actress, Ashleigh Morghan, had the difficult job of spending most of the runtime reacting to the proceedings from behind a windshield, in sort of a Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window way. She managed to hold the whole film together through a mostly silent performance because she’s so expressive.

The idea was that once the exposition had properly set up the rules and stakes at the top of the film, the bulk of it could play as an almost entirely visual suspense piece, leaning into that Hitchcockian notion of pure cinema. So it’s been fun to see it play the same way in every country, no matter what language they speak. Cinematic language is truly universal.

What part of seeing your film at Dead Northern are you looking forward to most?

I recently married a British woman and have been splitting my time between California and England, where I’m hoping to further establish myself in the UK film and horror communities, and I’ve already found such a wonderful community feel and enthusiasm from my involvement in Dead Northern.

I’m just grateful our little film will get to play with such a wonderful line-up of horror films, British and otherwise. It makes me feel like I’m home.

Three films, three very different approaches to short-form horror. Gumboro takes something as ordinary as moving into a new home and lets anxiety creep through the cracks, Dogs Reign uses genre to confront violence rooted firmly in the real world, while The Tall Dark Man reaches into folklore, noir and supernatural horror for its tale of a deadly deal gone wrong.

It’s precisely that variety that makes a festival shorts programme so much fun to explore. A new filmmaker, world or monster might only be around for a matter of minutes, but the best can linger long after the lights come back up.

We’ll be meeting more of the filmmakers behind Dead Northern 2026’s short film selection in the next instalment of Dead Northern Short Cuts.