Black Something (2016)

Director: David Zellner

In late 2015, "Bright Ideas" magazine and its publisher, the innovative crowdfunding and distribution platform Seed & Spark, commissioned directing duo the Zellner Bros. (KUMIKO, THE TREASURE HUNTER) to make a short piece in response to a Criterion Collection release that they considered inspiring. The brothers chose Louis Malle's wild, hallucinogenic BLACK MOON (1975), itself a tripped-out reimagining of "Alice in Wonderland." Shot in the woods near their Austin homes, BLACK SOMETHING captures Malle's blending of idyllic pastoral imagery with nightmarish fantasy, distilling it into a skin-crawlingly unsettling three-minute short.