As someone who is quite sceptical of Facebook Marketplace and online purchases that require collections from homes, you can imagine my curiosity with a title such as this.
Free Bench Must Pick Up Today, is a creepy short that screens as part of the latest Sohome Horror Pride online festival, highlighting alternative filmmakers.
We follow a queer couple (including Hunter Doohan, recognisable from Netflix’s Wednesday series), as they collect this fine bit of timber furniture, but what’s the catch?
As the couple get home and continue putting their apartment together, things start to get stranger and stranger, with sightings of an old man sitting on the bench.
Writer/Director Gus Reed does a fine job of building up an atmosphere whenever the bench is on screen, with excellent sound design and a feeling of real unease.
The conclusion is slightly unresolved, but this feels like the point as whatever is controlling this bench continues to haunt people until it is ground into dust or rotted away.
Free Bench Must Pick Up Today screens as part of Sohome Horror Pride 2024.
Bloody Flicks 