Excellent Claymation Shorts Offer Zombie Gore And Dystopian Parasites

By Nick Venable | Published

This article is more than 2 years old

You’d have to work at the lamest job imaginable if it’s a place where claymation gore is NSFW. I mean, claymation gore isn’t necessarily indicative of job loyalty or a healthy work ethic, but that’s just management speak for boring. Down with management! Down with clay zombies! (The first video is the exuberantly gross one. The second one is disturbing in an entirely different manner.)

Clay artist extraordinaire Trent Shy makes short claymation films and posters. And when I say “makes,” I mean he must have signed a deal with some demonic deity at one point in his life that allows him to manipulate clay with just his mind, culling together an impressively creative array of splatter-shots and goregasms for his clay characters to act out. Did you notice it was called Monster Zombie Claymation? Nobody gives a shit about clever names when there are so many goddamned zombie heads to explode. Seriously, it’s worth grabbing a pair of tomatoes before watching this video just so you can squeeze them to a pulpy nothingness and feel like part of the fun.

Anyone who needs a plot is welcome to tune into one of the billion other zombie-related pieces of fiction out there. If you want to see a bandana-wearing badass blast faces more wide open than Montana, put this video on repeat. It’s a conveyor belt of sopping wet violence inside a house of never ending horrors. Nothing is worse than a zombie whose head keeps reforming Terminator 2 style, except for the store-brand version of macaroni & cheese. And if the onscreen visuals by themselves should ever possibly come across as cartoonish, Shy’s dark synth score pervades the brain, making one continually wonder if this project’s creator is a hilarious genius or next in line for the straitjacket dressing room.

From the straight up gruesome to the subversive we go, landing on Sam Barnett’s dystopian short Operator. Barnett writes that this was partially inspired by “parasitic ideas” and by cordyceps mushrooms, a fungi that infects insects and arthropods by replacing their host tissue and sprouts from inside the bodies, killing whatever it takes over. Keep that in mind as you’re watching, and then try to get a good night’s sleep tonight.

In Operator, a man named Bob performs a task for the company Infocore, a job that resembles old school telephone operator systems and Battleship. While he’s in there, a mysterious creature forms on the floor and tries to become one with Bob, which is not high on everyone’s list of things they want to happen. But Bob’s resistance definitely costs him in the end.

What a depressing ending. The story is reminiscent of movies like The Matrix or Cube, in which those inhabiting a world aren’t at all aware of the bigger picture. It’s horrifying to imagine, but still gorgeous to look at, as all of the projects on the Barnett Film website are.

What have you made with clay lately?