Rune Spaan's The Absence of Eddy Table (2016)

NOTE: This Monday short was originally posted on September 9, 2019. We are re-uploading some of Peter Hemminger's amazing Monday Shorts until further notice.

It's been a few years since we showed The Absence of Eddy Table at GIRAF, but it isn't the kind of film that ever strays too far from your mind. That's to say, its aesthetic is so unique, its story so off-putting, its horrors so imaginative, that it seems to attach itself to your unconscious and never let go.

Based on the works of Canadian artist Dave Cooper, The Absence of Eddy Table is billed as a romantic horror film, but there's no conventional relationship to be found here. Instead there's only grotesque creatures, bizarre parasites, multi-tentacled things that are somehow sweet despite being intensely unsettling.

Spaan's film is incredibly slick—not in the way that's usually applied, but in the sense that everything in it has an odd sheen to it, a slipperiness that makes its world both glossy and gross. It's gooey like candy and slick like slime, at once appealing and awful. The look perfectly matches the story, a marriage of love at first sight and cosmic horror you won't soon forget.