This Experimental, Nightmarish Series of Shorts Does Cosmic and Body Horror Right

Making a feature film is quite expensive, and while some people have access to large pools of cash, convincing them to use it to finance your film is difficult. A finished screenplay would be the typical “proof of concept” one would use to demonstrate that a film was worth investing in. But some aspiring filmmakers have tried shooting a short version of their feature instead. Of course, it’s a risk, since producing a short film is pretty expensive on its own, and very, very few shorts will become features. But it can pan out; the feature film Whiplash and the recent animated series Scavengers Reign both began as shorts.

Before those, however, was Alive in Joburg, a short sci-fi film from director Neill Blomkamp. The short drew the attention of Peter Jackson, allowing Blomkamp to expand the story into his extraordinary feature debut, District 9. Two films later, Blomkamp returned to that well. This time, not just with one short but with a full slate of them. The concept behind Oats Studios, which Blomkamp founded in 2017, was that it would produce several short films, and audiences would select the best to be developed into a feature. And though none of the first round of shorts have been turned into features, they’re still interesting on their own as a collection of unfinished science fiction concept work from the notebook of Neil Blomkamp. Each one is an unpolished, unfinished, unfiltered nightmare that collectively do as much to share their director’s vision of the world as any feature ever could.

What Are Oats Studios’ Shorts About?

Most of the Oats shorts bear the hallmarks of Blomkamp’s particular visual style, blending vérité-style camera work with wall-to-wall CGI to create a visceral sense of being in one of his fantastical landscapes. Thematically, he’s always fixated on the barrier between body and mind, and he enjoys destroying this divide in his protagonists, seeing how much he can break down their sense of self and still feel human. This dates back to District 9, in which South African bigot Wikus (Sharlto Copley) has his body slowly transformed into the thing that disgusts him the most, an alien Prawn. However, in the Oats shorts, Blomkamp dials up the sadism even further. It’s body horror, but while a filmmaker like David Cronenberg builds to moments of horror with slowly escalating dread, Blomkamp employs zero foreplay.

Take “Rakka,” the short that’s typically given top billing among the set. (The shorts can be found on Netflix, presented as a single “season” in which each short is an “episode.”). It’s another alien invasion story, but unlike in District 9, the aliens are vicious colonizers whose victory over humanity is all but complete. In the first 30 seconds, Blomkamp presents an image of the Eiffel Tower, which the aliens have covered in flayed, moaning, human victims. This excess sets the tone for everything that’s to come.

Related

This Series of Horror Shorts Led to an 18-Year-Old Getting His Own A24 Film

Thanks A24, I didn’t want to sleep anyway.

In addition to their superior technology, which they use to terraform Earth into a giant swamp, the aliens can also mind control humans simply by looking at them and can put alien goo in a human brain to permanently enslave them. Frankly, they may deserve the win. However, Sigourney Weaver leads a human resistance in a hopeless series of suicide missions. They’re doomed until they encounter Amir (District 9’sEugene Khumbanyiwa), who has survived the worst alien experiments, and come out the other end with superhuman abilities. And, just when we humans are about to turn the tides, the short ends on a cliffhanger. If you’d like to see more, you’ll have to put up the money to develop “Rakka” into a feature.

‘Zygote,’ Featuring Dakota Fanning, and ‘Firebase’ Are Oats Studios’ Other Blockbuster Shorts

“Zygote” is a little more patient than “Rakka,” though not by much. Dakota Fanning, currently starring in The Watchers, plays Barkley, a synthetic human laborer who is one of few survivors of a cosmic horror mishap at an Alaskan science installation. The base has uncovered some kind of deity, which compels the base’s scientists to cut humans apart and stitch them together into a hideous monstrosity. The creature, when it appears, is compelling, although you’ll have seen something like it before if you’ve played The Last of Us, or the indie game Inside. The short itself borrows much of its mechanics from survival horror video games, as Barkley must find the key that will unlock the door to a room in the base while hiding from the creature.

“Firebase” is the most unique short in the Oats Studios slate. Set during the Vietnam War, it concerns the battle between two super-powered beings on opposite sides of the conflict. The “River God” is a Vietnamese farmer (Carlo Yu) whose family was killed by an American air strike. The overpowering grief transformed him into an invulnerable being hellbent on vengeance. Sergeant Hines (Steve Boyle) is an American soldier who has been chosen by “life itself” to combat the River God, and this gift also allows him to wear strange time-warping battle armor developed by the CIA. In many ways, it’s the most difficult of these shorts to pin down. Its historical setting also gives it more substance than the other shorts, which take place in familiar imagined realities – even if the Vietnam setting seems to be largely about aesthetics. Perhaps these eccentricities were the reason that “Firebase” was the Oats Studios short that the audience selected to become a feature. However, the Kickstarter fell short and Oats Studios canceled the project.

Some of the Oats Studios Shorts Are More Comedic

Not all of these shorts present a battle between good and evil, which can only be resolved in a feature film. A few of them are just little comedic goofs (and even have their own “comic” Oats Studios production logo). In “Bad President!” Alec Gillis plays an American president who is “here to party,” and conducts meetings with his staff in the hungover aftermath of all-night benders. It’s pretty stale satire, although making the President’s party animal buddy a Canadian is a nice touch. “Cooking with Bill” is a satire on the home shopping network (also featuring Alec Gillis), in which all of the kitchen implements are powered by demonic technology and make hideously deformed food. Rounding out the Oats Studios comedies is “God,” which stars Sharlto Copley as God and Jason Cope as God’s butler. This version of God is an even worse leader than Bad President. Slouching over a massive model of a city, or a prehistoric plain, God tortures humans for his own amusement. It seems to play as a satire on Blomkamp himself, who creates massive worlds just to fill them with pain. But it’s hard to tell how self-aware this satire actually is.

The Oats Studios Shorts Also Explore New Technology

Some of the Oats Studios shorts are animated. In “Kapture: Locust,” a pair of dweeby scientists demonstrate new military hardware for an unknown camera person. The mind control technology they’ve developed allows them to puppet a convict who has volunteered to be a guinea pig into blowing himself up. It’s a sliver of world-building that doesn’t really go anywhere. “Adam” is much more substantial. Across three episodes, it tells the story of cyborgs with metal bodies and human brains. They have been created by the dystopian Consortium, which creates these sad creatures to punish the freedom fighters within their walled city. Though the three episodes don’t move the story very far along, the world-building is compelling.

“Adam” and “Kapture: Locust” were created using the Unity Development Platform, better known as a video game engine and asset store. (The New Yorker recently published an unnerving look at the growing importance in filmmaking of the Unreal and Unity asset stores.) The Oats Studio YouTube channel offers a lot of behind-the-scenes videos of the work done using Unity, which Blomkamp extols as technology that will democratize the entertainment industry. It’s astonishing that Blomkamp could create so many nightmare visions of technology, in which control of the body is stripped from the mind, and then seamlessly transition into this giddy futurism. Watching him toy with a digital asset created by the actor Michael Rogers (the antagonist in both Beyond the Black Rainbow and We’re All Going to the World’s Fair), you kind of want to shout at him that this isn’t going to end well. If there was still a chance to vote about which short to expand into a feature, it might be these behind-the-scenes featurettes. How will that comeuppance be delivered?

Oats Studios shorts are available to stream on Netflix, with more to explore on their YouTube channel.

Watch on Netflix