Short Film: Scary Story: The Girl in the Woods Who Never Left! (2024)

• By “Fear Fusion”
• Stars Animated
• Run Time: 5:22
• Watch it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QT95SRWODhY

What Happens

We’re told a story about a girl who saw a scary ghost. The ghost is terrible and terrifying and warns the girl to lock her door at night. Why would the ghost tell the girl how to avoid her? Maybe the ghost isn’t the girl’s biggest problem…

Brian’s Commentary

This came up in my YouTube feed, so I gave it a shot. We don’t normally pan indie films and short films, as they need to be held to a different standard than multimillion dollar blockbusters. Some of these films are done by a single person with zero budget. Still, WTF is this shit? 

The story is formulaic and cliche. That’s not a killer in itself, as lots of horror stories are retellings and new imaginings of the same tropes. That’s not a deal breaker. 

The “animation” is basically a slideshow of images, some photographic (maybe?), and some done by AI. 

The narration appears to be done by computer voice, complete with bad English and typos. To make it worse, the bad English and typos appear on screen with the words being read highlighted– like karaoke. 

Many people see AI as the future of entertainment. Well, maybe, maybe not, but stuff like this shows just how lazy a filmmaker can get. I assume it’s all just AI-generated garbage to “game” YouTube’s algorith– this must be a successful tactic, as it popped up in my feed along with many actually good short films.

I mostly decided to feature this one just to troll Kevin. Let’s hear what he has to say…

Kevin’s Commentary

I couldn’t even finish this. AI should be used for things like detecting cancer and optimizing crop plans for farmers, not for creating things like this absolute garbage. It even looks like all the YouTube comments are generated by AI bots. This is the first time I’ve clicked on the thumbs down on YouTube for one of the shorts we’ve reviewed, and I wish I could click it out of existence. It was a waste of the electricity required to create it.