an Ontological Analog Horror short film.
After a physicist's discovery destabilizes reality, a shadowy agency's failed attempt to silence him triggers his psychological collapse, initiating a final, world-ending cascade failure that a lone operator is helpless to contain.
Constructed from repurposed public domain footage, "The Glitch" is an experimental ontological procedural horror film.
It documents the final, monitored hours of Subject 4887576. Years after his theoretical physics work inadvertently triggered a "reality collapse confluence," and a failed attempt on his life by a shadowy agency cost him his family, the containment protocol has begun to fail.
His personal grief begins to manifest as catastrophic failures in the fabric of his reality. From a remote observation post, a lone operator can only watch as the subject's psychological decay spreads, corrupting the physical laws of his environment and leading to a final, inevitable system shutdown.
The film is an exercise in the analog horror aesthetic, featuring a minimalist synth score. It is a meditation on the fragility of reality and the terrifying power of a single, broken mind.
More details:
This short is an 8-minute experimental narrative constructed as an exercise in procedural horror using repurposed public domain footage.
The film is presented as a "found" case file, as a fragmented log from a failed containment operation documenting the final hours of a man whose mind has become a catalyst for ontological decay.
The narrative architecture is deliberately bifurcated, juxtaposing the subjective, psychological disintegration of the protagonist with the cold, clinical, and increasingly desperate teletype logs of the system attempting to monitor him.
The central thesis explores the concept of a "reality collapse confluence," where a profound intellectual breakthrough (a discovery akin to Bell's Theorem 10 years before it is supposed to happen) combines with a catastrophic emotional trauma to create a feedback loop that corrupts the fabric of reality itself.
The aesthetic is one of "managed decay," with all source footage unified under a consistent layer of visual degradation to reinforce the theme of a high-entropy universe.
The minimalist synth score and the diegetic "teletype" serve as the primary narrative drivers in a film largely devoid of traditional dialogue.
It is a formalist exploration of the Watchmaker paradox: what happens when the one man who understands the machine's code becomes the very bug that will cause its inevitable crash?
