Sam Kolesnik and Vanessa Wright are a dynamic duo of women filmmakers. You’ll recognize their names immediately as the organizers of the Women in Horror Film Festival as well as the accomplished creators of such films as I Baked Him a Cake and Rainy Season. Their latest work, however, is a true collaboration between the two and tells a story as heartbreaking tragic as it is horrifying. Mama’s Boy is about a male prostitute who has been sexually and physically abused while pus

I saw a lot of incredible short films during the Women in Horror Film Festival. Everything running the gamut from psychological torture to outright gore and always from a unique perspective. There were movies that gave me the creeps, that made me laugh, and more than a few that left me pretty shaken up as the lights came up in the screening room. But none of what I saw had prepared me for the abject horror and discomfort that I suffered at the hands of Unbearing. Warning, the

Atmospheric. It’s the first word, the best word to describe Samantha Kolesnik’s short film I Baked Him a Cake. The music is haunting, cold as we open up in a small, dimly lit room where a woman is busy at work with power tools. We cut to a scene on the wall, the silhouette of the woman and someone else cast on the wall. In a crunchy, slopping of meat and bone rendered away from a body, the arm comes free and, despite seeing the visceral carnage of human devastation that has b

Women have always had an integral, if not somewhat cubbyholed role to play in the horror genre. In the earliest days of the genre on stage and screen they became either the damsel in distress to be rescued by the heroic male lead or they were some villainous monstress, a concubine of Satan sent to steer that same male hero into disaster. Even with the emergence of women’s rights and changing views of sex and sexuality in society, the most you could ever hope for was still som