SLAY RIDE

There’s something uniquely unsettling about a film that understands precisely how much to withhold. "Slay Ride" may last only four minutes, but it behaves like a whisper pressed against a bruise—small, precise, and absolutely deliberate. Ed Shiers seems to recognise that the scariest moments of childhood don’t come from monsters in closets, but from the moments when the walls of a home stop feeling safe. This short leans into that quiet domestic terror and then twists it into something mythic, almost folkloric, without ever abandoning its emotional centre.

What struck me first wasn’t the violence, nor even the horror, but the stillness. Shiers opens with the image of a silent Christmas film on a muted television, a cheery song filling the void where dialogue should be. It’s an image that feels almost too familiar—family rituals framed in warmth—but there’s an uncanny charge in the air, as though the décor itself is bracing for impact.

For a story built on chaos just out of sight, the film’s true power lies in its restraint. By keeping us anchored in the boy’s space—watching him absorb every sound he cannot interpret but instinctively fears—the film recreates something painfully honest. That childlike dread of adult conflict, that attempt to shrink your own breathing so you don’t draw attention to yourself, that suspended moment where you’re old enough to understand danger but too young to confront it. The horror isn’t supernatural at first—it’s painfully human. And perhaps that’s why what follows feels so charged: the world of childhood fantasy intrudes not as whimsy, but as a merciless corrective.

The use of sound design is extraordinary. Shiers treats it as the real protagonist—bells, thumps, muffled voices, and a voice from the roof that carries equal parts mirth and menace. You begin to distrust your own imagination because the film asks you to picture everything happening just beyond the door. And somehow, the mind always invents something worse. That’s the real cruelty of hearing without seeing: you become complicit in your own fear, shaping the threat in the dark.

When the camera finally moves with the boy, the shift feels earned. Not a reveal, but an aftermath. The film understands that trauma doesn’t happen in the moment—it happens in the processing, in the dissonance between what should be festive and what has now been violated. The Christmas imagery, once cosy, becomes grotesque by contrast. Familiar shapes feel corrupted. Joy feels counterfeit. It’s not the shock that lingers; it’s the sense that childhood has just been severed in one night, replaced with an understanding far beyond what any child should have to carry.

And yet there’s something strangely tender threaded through it. A sense that the universe—at least in this warped little story—saw a line being crossed and sent something ancient to redraw it. Not comforting, exactly, but cathartic in its own bleak way. The film doesn’t offer neat resolutions or moral lessons. Instead, it presents a moment of intervention that feels both monstrous and necessary, as though justice has taken a shape no one would ever pray for, but which arrives anyway.

"Slay Ride" is brief, brutal, and surprisingly beautiful in its emotional clarity. Shiers turns a holiday myth into a reckoning and does so with a confidence that many longer films would envy. It’s a Christmas tale for anyone who grew up knowing that fear doesn’t wait until midnight—and that sometimes the only thing more terrifying than what’s on the roof is what’s already inside the house.