Experimental and often disturbing short films that feel as if they are coming from a strange background of extreme underground horror SOV, non-narrative avant-garde filmography and NYC transgression, extreme noise and power electronics, and themes of body horror, grief, loss, extreme trauma and mutation. This Bay Area collective is made up of Craig Jacobson and Cassandra Sechler, who together handle essentially every single aspect of their filmmaking, producing some of the most interesting DIY experimental "horror" work coming out at the moment. I was introduced to The Dreams For Dead Cats team via the amazing no-fi cyberpunk film Elliot, which I'll be covering elsewhere; their imagination is on full display with that piece of weird darkness. That film became an instant favorite, one of the coolest things I've seen come out of the underground film scene in the past decade, so I started digging around for more of their work. Thankfully, the team produced this DVD that collects most of their short films produced between 2010 and 2018, and is an eye-popping feast of hand-made nightmares. Much of the work here is helmed by Sechler; Cassandra Sechler's directed material is visceral, overwhelming and often absurd, and really stands out in this collection. There's a lot to feast on here, and it's highly recommended for anyone else that was bewitched by Elliot. Here's a blow-by-blow, more or less:

The short-short Sugar Cubes is a lovely piece of spoken-word prose-poetry set against a few minutes of bizarre images and seemingly random household items scattered among brief flashes of almost giallo-like symbolism; the spoken-word element is terrific surrealist strangeness, with some really indelible images conveyed through the half-whispered vocal delivery of a childhood attempt at invoking soe kind of time-travel experience. It's one of their more overtly Lynch-influenced pieces, but also one of the most beautiful in its own strange dreamhaze.

Sechler's Wireboy is the duo's best known work prior to Elliot, a 2013 non-narrative Cyberhorror short that is one of the longest in this collection, a fifteen-minute video emetic that more than any other piece here suggests the dystopian neon horrors of Elliot, a blur of shocking color filters and brutal lighting, a sonic undercurrent of post-industrial kosmische synthesizer-skizz and vast Lustmordian rumble that sets to fraying your nerve endings from the moment it begins, again mixing stark high-contrast black and white footage with brightly colored video. It's a bizarre and (naturally) hallucinatory dose of Cyber-drone filmmaking that seems to morph between some kind of insane blood-red cabaret experience, scenes of quasi-human mutations rustling through the debris of a decaying urban hellscape. A murky bacterial stew of early Rinse Dream and Kenneth Anger and a ketamine-dosed Shinya Tsukamoto experiment, swirling with images of filthy, nude figures in the throes of ceremonial debasement and ecstatic degradation, cybernetic orgasm amid rubber fetishism, dead-TV static and leering feminine faces obscured by monstrous VR tech and extreme necrosis, vile fleshy abominations mewling in distress, huge cancerous boils erupting into fountains of pus, an exercise in body horror voyeurism via no-fi basement ritual. It really is a thing of disgusting splendor, as graphic and disturbing as it is confusing and tantalizing. Wireboy is one of the main shorts here that fans of the Cats Collective that discovered them via Elliot will want to see, if no no other reason than a glimpse of their evolving creative vision that will sit in the bottom of your stomach like a memories of an accidentally-viewed cartel or accident video.

Deep oceanic thrum opens Passing as the viewer is led through a temporal montage of black and white suburban scenery, wildlife, buildings, empty streets, while an achingly sad and haunting piano drifts through soft and slow; this mournful diary-like piece is quite effective as a piece of atmospheric film collage, imbued with a lingering mournful quality....but also subtly shifting into a more sinister, unsettling setting, the images growing bleached out and then swallowed in black murk, as if you're watching a life's experience being consumed in blackness.....there's a real funereal vibe around this one, a real standout if just for the music alone...

The gore-smeared, prurient post-industrial tone poem Belle Nouveau from 2010 emerges as mysterious black and white dream-fragments, stark and high-contrast images of a small group of women surrounding a malfunctioning television set as grim over-modulated electronic squeals and rumblings (courtesy of Blackbody) shudder beneath their feet, dialogue-free characters manipulating and stroking some barely-discernable fleshy abomination, employing old telephone tech and zooming in on potentially erotic oral fumblings with god-knows-what, cutting between scenes of blurry cathode TV static and broken transmissions, a spasmodic marionette, black bile spilling from their mouths, this array of images and movements moving forward like some kind of ceremonial ritual gone awry. Also from 2010, Proof That It Happened: NM is a stark and beautiful ambient video collage set to some fantastic elegiac music (powerful and poignant post-rock which sounds like something that could've emerged from the Temporary Residence crowd), scenes from rural New Mexican towns, patches of stone, derelict houses, the moving shadows transforming this into a ghostly neighborhood portrait.

Opening with a title card quote from Descartes, the unholy Qualia unfolds as a bleary black and white nightmare of malformed animalistic puppets and tortured forms scurrying across the screen, the constantly shifting images bleeding with Brakhage-ian smears of color. Glimpses of something akin to a Hieronymus Bosch hellscape teeming with tiny monstrosities, can be spotted through the murky video, backed by a subtle sinister dark ambient soundtrack that builds into a richly layered field of atonality, sweeping celestial electronics, and heavily dimmed drone, spreading these images and movements into a nearly twelve minute long hallucination, a deeply melancholy atmosphere seeping from each frame of video, images of cage-like barriers and anguished gestures, a grotesque cabaret of maddened non-human entities.

The video poem Chained sets a creepy mood from the start, lines of dark insight read over another constantly changing collage that moves between horrific nightmarish scenes and random nocturnal scenes, all in the space iof a few minutes - it's like a fragment of a horrible night terror captured/transmitted to videocassette, skin-crawling and hideous with no context aside from the presence of something vile.

2011's Lovey is a shorter piece that blends poetry reading with more of that disturbing color palette iof human skin bathed in yellow and orange, gold-masked faces and fetish-esque gloves stretched across turning hands, a pulsating bass drone building beneath these more explicit images of pierced flesh, chains, genitalia, orchids, surrounded by a cacophony of whispered voices - a graphic interpolation of graphic violent sexuality / eroticism and ceremonial magick that builds into a hysteria of bloodplay and psychosis. Finally, the closing short Lovesick is one of Sechler's most foul quasi-narrative nightmares, full-color and neon-lensed scenes of writhing gore-soaked entities, a background mass of choral voices and crushing distortion, again pointing to the style that they would fully flesh out with Elliot; there are truly repulsive images here, weirdly erotic and septic at the same time, nauseating even (especially with those oppressive low-frequency drones that surge out of the mix) - a surreal, disgusting merge of the carnal and the sacred, vile and extreme sexually explicit gestures - an experiment in synthesizing an alien being's imagined sexual desires, it's some truly bizarre avant-goreporn awash with a soundtrack that feels like Dead Can Dance infested with waves of harsh noise, a track titled "Shadow Of A Witch" by an artist called Anaphylaxis.

Craig Jacobson's directed material consists of two of the collection's most abrasive pieces: issuing from the depths of another curious melange of movements, locations, dull colors, there are waves of gut-churning low frequency hum that permeate the beginning of 2011's Alligator Bitch, a cryptic collection of overlaid images with geometry connecting some of these environments; the murky and gorgeous keyboard chordal drones that Jacobson gradually builds align with the shift into an anguished dialogue-free performance from one Julia Berkowitz with flashes of leering nightmarish grins , monstrous roars, and lurid neon colors, bordering on an extreme dance/performance piece. And Cerberus from 2012 is one of the most aggressively psychedelic and disturbing shorts in the collection, an assault of strobing faces twisted into tortured visages as a camera soaks in the emotionless face of a man drenched in neon while a distinctly power-electronics-style soundtrack undulates underneath. An infinite schizophrenic scream of a consciousness trapped for eternity in the spoiling guts of malfunctioning electronic equipment.

Some of the longer works are more effective than the older, shorter pieces as you'd expect, but there's a disturbing quality to ALL of it, and it just continues to feed my fascination with what these two cats are doing. Their films feel like they come from somewhere on the edges of those nightmarish Lynch shorts from the pre-Eraserhead period of the early 70s, and elsewhere evoke hints of Cronenberg, Begotten, Clive Barker's early 70's art films, the work of Kenneth Anger, and even the cruder corners of Japanese cyberpunk cinema. Confronting, endlessly creative and intrepid work from one of the most interesting filmmaker teams I'm following right now.

The DVD includes an insert that has a very brief description of the concepts behind each film. NTSC format.