Sometimes selecting an image to best represent a film is a difficult task – with Chris McInroy’s Bad Guy #2 I think I nailed it. A blood-soaked short featuring some of the best practical-fx you’re likely to witness in all of 2015, this gore-filled story of a henchman’s promotion through his crime gang is a darkly funny and completely unforgettable short that I could happily watch again and again.

A film I’ve wanted to get on Short of the Week for a long time now, McInroy’s influences are plain to see. Inspired by the films he watched growing up – Evil Dead 2, The Thing, American Werewolf in London – this is a filmmaker whose love of genre films shines through in his own work.

Inspired by the role of the “bad guy” in feature movies, the director explained to Short of the Week how a quick exploration of his film collection led him to pen the storyline for his short.

“I started looking at my DVD collection trying to see if there was anything that would spark an idea based on stuff I like”, says McInroy, “or any angles from things I like that could be like a spin-off story. There were a couple Jackie Chan movies in there, specifically the one called Who Am I, and it got me remembering how many generic bad guys Jackie has to fight and they just keep coming and they basically have no identity besides somebody who is there to be pummeled. So I thought maybe a story about a generic henchman could work. And then weeks later I watched the MacGruber movie and Batman in a row and in both of those I noticed Cunth and Joker kill their own henchmen and I thought “oh man what about the guy who has to take the place of the guy they just saw get murdered by the boss?” Those guys are not gonna be looking forward to a promotion where the boss may kill them as well”

A fun-filled gore-fest of a film, McInroy’s short takes you back to the time when blood-splattered Horror played on the big-screen and Peter Jackson was known more for his Bad Taste than his Hobbit-filled blockbusters. It feels like a film that perfectly transitions the worlds of festival and online screenings; ideal to be shared in a room full of like-minded people, but also just the right amount of comedy and carnage to make it a hit online.

If you like Bad Guy #2’s style, you’ll be happy to hear the director is already working on his next short Death Metal. Another practical-FX driven film, McInroy’s latest tale is one of a young metalhead who gets passed down a satanic guitar from his metalhead dad and what doesn’t sound awesome about that?

If you want to know more about how Chris and his team created the amazing FX in Bad Guy #2 or follow the progress of Death Metal, be sure to check out our in-depth interview with the filmmaker.