Horror Shorts in Focus: Infection
There are plenty of reasons to turn down a promotion. Longer hours, extra responsibility, more meetings that should have been emails and the horrifying possibility that somebody might start describing your workplace as a “family”. Infection adds another potential drawback to the list: your boss appears to be decomposing in front of you and you are starting to develop the same symptoms.
Directed by James Kicklighter, Infection is a ten-minute workplace body horror starring Isabel Adele Brown as Jane, an ambitious office worker faced with a choice between the career advancement she desperately wants and rather more important matters such as her health. The screenplay was written by Chelsea Franklin, Faleb Lindo, Fanny Gallegos, Matthew Miller and Tyler Ohaya through Kids in the Spotlight, a Los Angeles programme that works with foster youth and pairs young storytellers with professional filmmakers and industry mentors.
The film immediately establishes that something isn’t quite right. Presented in a boxy 4:3 aspect ratio, it opens with Jane working at a computer where strange symbols appear on the screen instead of conventional lettering. That detail isn’t simply random digital gibberish either. Kicklighter developed a custom display font for Infection as part of the production design, intended to make the fictional corporate world appear polished while feeling subtly wrong.
Then Jane’s boss arrives, played by Daniel Williams-Lopez, and “subtly wrong” starts progressing towards “perhaps somebody should call a doctor”.
Wearing a grey suit and gloves, he is visibly unwell, with blemishes appearing on his face while coughing can also be heard elsewhere around the workplace. Jane nevertheless has her eyes on a promotion. When she later meets the Boss in his office, his worsening condition is difficult to ignore, even if the corporate ladder apparently remains considerably more interesting than the increasingly obvious biological nightmare climbing up it.
Away from work, Jane visits her mother, Ma, played by Lisa Partridge, in hospital. Here Kicklighter achieves something particularly upsetting: he makes a bowl of porridge look absolutely disgusting. Jane is merely stirring it, but the overhead close-up and squelchy sound work transform innocent oats into something that looks as though it should be examined by a laboratory rather than eaten for breakfast. We love porridge at Stalk & Slash, James. Or at least we did.
That attention to sound runs throughout Infection. Nicolas Repetto’s score brings an industrial quality to the film, while the effects help make Jane’s deteriorating situation increasingly uncomfortable. The dialogue is also cleanly captured, and the overall sound design complements the oppressive corporate environment rather than simply waiting for something horrible to happen and then screaming at us about it.
Cinematographer Jonathan Pope gives the short a deliberately textured appearance, with the film grain and restricted frame helping Infection feel strangely removed from pristine contemporary digital filmmaking. At times there is something distinctly retro about it, with shades of an older corporate nightmare dragged into the present.
Kicklighter, who also edited the film, makes some interesting visual choices between scenes. One particularly effective transition comes during another hospital visit, when Jane finishes working on her laptop and closes it. At virtually the exact instant the computer shuts, the colour disappears from the image and the film continues in black and white. It is a small flourish, but an imaginative one.
Meanwhile, Jane’s own infection is becoming impossible to ignore. A nasty-looking rash develops on her forearm, the scratching eventually draws blood, and her Boss isn’t doing much better, with crimson now running down his face. Apparently “everyone in the office appears to be contracting a hideous disease” still isn’t sufficient justification for taking a sick day.
That is where Infection’s body horror connects effectively with its workplace satire. Jane continues pursuing advancement even as her body is quite literally telling her to stop. The idea can easily be read as a metaphor for the sacrifices people make in pursuit of professional success, pushing through exhaustion, illness and neglected relationships because the next promotion or opportunity always seems important enough to justify it.
It also gives Jane’s hospital visits greater weight. Infection isn’t merely asking whether getting ahead is worth becoming physically sick. It places work alongside family and personal connection, asking what can disappear while somebody remains fixated on whatever comes next professionally.
With around one minute and fifty seconds of its ten-minute running time occupied by the end credits, Infection actually has surprisingly little time to establish its world and make its point. Kicklighter uses those minutes efficiently, delivering a polished, well-shot short with strong sound, memorable body-horror imagery and enough visual experimentation to give the corporate nightmare its own identity.
And, perhaps most impressively, it manages to make career advancement, mysterious skin infections and porridge feel like parts of the same nightmare.
Human Resources are going to need a considerably bigger form.
