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Just before the final buzzer sounds on Halloween 2018, Netflix has showed up with a collection of five horror short films as a kind of special Halloween bonus for subscribers. Don’t Watch This consists of five short (sometimes very short) films with a horror theme: obsession, dark technology, psychopathic narcissism. The shorts are assembled from a Netflix call-out to their own talent and streaming partners to create the most “unbearable, unwatchable, can’t-possibly-finish” horror shorts imaginable. What resulted are a pair of shorts from CryptTV, one from the producers of Netflix’s Haunted, and one particularly eye-catching horror parody from Queer Eye‘s food guru Antoni Porowski. I can’t imagine why:
The Antoni short, titled “Antoni Psycho,” is so canny it’s scary. Re-fashioning Antoni — whose coat-hanger grin, impeccable grooming, and ridiculously muscled-up torso make him the perfect stand-in for Christian Bale’s version of psycho killer Patrick Bateman in the 2000 film American Psycho — as a dead-eyed narcissist who dines on raw liver and maybe has murdered his fellow Queer Eye co-hosts (Tan, at least) and keeps their corpses in his home is some second-level leaning into the skid when it comes to detractors. Antoni has been the Queer Eye lightning rod since the show’s inception, often critiqued for being the host whose good looks (off the charts) and expert status (the food expert who defaults to lots of guacamole dips) seem to be the most incongruous. Antoni, for his part, has faced down criticism by modeling for underwear and crop-topping every shirt in his wardrobe. It’s all been done with a slight wink, and after parodying the Patrick Bateman face-mask scene with a thickly-applied layer of Greek yogurt, we have to tip the cap to Antoni staying one step ahead of the critics.
Meanwhile, as with any collection of horror shorts, Don’t Watch This is a mixed bag, though allow me to point out that episode 1 (“The Friendship Bracelet”) is far scarier and more violent than I was expecting. Also, the entire set of 5 shorts runs a total of 25 minutes, so you really have no excuse not to sample. Also, to re-iterate:
