Although a really good short film can catapult a director into feature filmmaking, much like Gil Kenan’s short film The Lark led to the chance to direct the CGI film Monster House for Robert Zemeckis and the just-completed live action The City of Ember , film festivals often show short films that most audiences won’t have a chance to see anywhere else. Fantastic Fest had a shorts playing in front of many of the features, and they also had two separate shorts screenings: Short Fuse for live action shorts, and Animated Shorts for, well… animated shorts. On first glance, the long-titled The Facts In The Case Of Mister Hollow doesn’t appear to be animation, but slowly you come to realize that it’s a series of still photographs that tell a very chilling story. It was my favorite amongst the animated shorts, and hopefully it’ll be seen by more audiences soon.

Director Rodrigo Gudino has directed two previous short films, The Demonology of Desire and The Eyes of Edward James, but The Facts clocks in as his shortest at only five minutes and 58 seconds. The extremely creepy music is provided by Johnny Hollow, a band which has been personified in Gudino’s film as an investigator of the macabre. In the opening shots, we see Johnny Hollow’s desk, spread with the accessories of a detective, possibly in the 1930s or 1940s, with a note imploring us to “Look closely…” at a single photograph.

As the camera zooms in and out of the image, you begin to see things hidden in it. The angle will shift slightly, allowing you to see what’s behind something, or reveal a reflection in a mirror. What originally looks like a happy couple holding a baby, standing next to a car while a man off to the side prepares to light a fire eventually turns into a disturbing scene that might depict a human sacrifice. Each time we zoom in, we see that the action has advanced by just a few frames, and it’s amazing what a difference those can make.

Besides being a director, Gudino also founded Rue Morgue, which serves as a magazine, blog, radio show, and producer of films for the horror crowd. The Facts in the Case of Mister Hollow will be taking him all over the world, having just left Austin, he’s now heading to Spain, Switzerland, London, and other points all over the map. Check out the full tour here to see if you can catch this film.