PENTAGRAM GIRL

Some stories wear their horror on their sleeve, but "Pentagram Girl" creeps in with the quiet grief of inherited trauma—its weight not just spoken of, but embodied. The film doesn’t simply offer a tale of demons and shadows; it asks what it means to live in the aftermath of someone else’s darkness, and whether we are ever truly free of it.

Jenna, played with aching restraint and simmering intensity by Lisa Anne Sclar, is the daughter of a necromancer—not the sort of title that fits neatly into a eulogy. But Enk’s short is less about the supernatural practice and more about the legacy it leaves behind: the silent codes of behaviour, the unspoken rules of the household, the unspeakable thing in the basement. The entity her father imprisoned there is less a monster and more a metaphor: something ugly and half-formed, made of pain and repression, sealed away with care but never truly forgotten.

The brilliance of Enk's horror short, lies in how it plays with perception. There’s a dance between the literal and the psychological—between what we see and what we sense. Is the demon real? Does it matter? As Jenna is interviewed by Jordan, the tension builds not just from what might be lurking in the dark, but from what Jenna herself might be capable of.

Every line she delivers seems wrapped in layers of past harm and present defiance.

This isn’t a story interested in clean answers and Enk wisely resists the urge to over-explain, allowing the audience to dwell in the ambiguity, in turn making the viewing experience more unsettling, but also more human. Horror, after all, isn’t about who can scream the loudest—it can be a whisper, a memory, a legacy passed from parent to child... like a curse.

Visually, the film finds beauty in decay. Dust motes catch in the light like remnants of memory. The basement, so often a tired horror trope, is transformed into a liminal space—a place where time and truth blur. Some of the digital effects wobble, yes, but the practical design work and makeup artistry ground the terror in something tactile and lived-in.

Ultimately, "Pentagram Girl" is about reckoning. With the dead, with the past, with the parts of ourselves we’d rather not claim. It’s a short film with long shadows, and once it’s over, you may find yourself haunted not by what you saw—but by what was suggested, and what remains unseen.