Rodrigo Goulão de Sousa’s Uncanny Alley, originally a series of three-minute shorts for Adult Swim’s Smalls, combines these films (The Screening, The Night Shift & The Roommate) into a singularly unsettling seven-minute experience. Set in a small town plagued by eerie cinema dwellers, disembodied brains, and insect infestations, this monochrome animation masterfully evokes a sense of dread through everyday scenarios that gradually unravel into nightmarish visions.

With one of Sousa’s aims to introduce “a new monster per episode” throughout the series, he decided for his films he wanted to take “regular situations, or familiar places and add progressive layers of weirdness until the final shot”. Sousa promises the surreal and certainly delivers, but it’s the grounded nature of the locations and settings that truly enhances the film’s impact. These are everyday situations where anything can happen.

Built around a growing sense of dread, Uncanny Alley favours stillness and pauses over frantic action. As danger escalates, the inhabitants of this small town often appear frozen by fear or disbelief before their fight-or-flight instincts finally kick in. Although this approach was partly due to production constraints – Sousa explains in this interview with Ellis Tree that he had to “limit unnecessary movements and use many relatively static shots” – this constraint in no way detracts from the film’s effectiveness.

A striking short in both aesthetic and tone, Uncanny Alley initially captivates its audience with its surreal nature. However, as this surrealism is quickly joined by a pervasive sense of unease, viewers are soon overwhelmed by a palpable fear. Despite recognising Sousa’s film as fiction, your imagination runs wild, compelling you to place yourself in these scenarios and ponder how you would confront these nightmarish monsters. After watching this, I don’t think I’ll ever feel safe in the cinema again!