Deadtime Stories (7:46)
Breehn Burns; Mike Dougherty; Pop Gypsy; TV Tropes; YouTube

This isn't technically a short film, it's actually a speculative pilot for an MTV series that never got made. I believe the pilot itself was made in 2003, but as far as I recall, I didn't see it or even become aware of it until 2014. In 2013, an unrelated series with the same name debuted on Nickelodeon, and it was sometime in 2014 that I was looking up information on that, and stumbled across this. It's rather a shame it didn't become a series, because it's definitely clever and creepy and twisted and seems like it had the potential to be a cool show... you know, if you like creepy and twisted animated shows. (I might have rated such a series higher than I do the pilot as a standalone story.)

It's about this young girl named Ebola, who has recently been released from an insane asylum. She's living with her parents, now, but it's hard to imagine that's much better than where she was, because her mother is verbally abusive and her father seems completely disinterested. Of course, Ebola herself may still be crazy, because her mirror reflection talks to her, and tells her to lie to her parents, in order to avoid being sent back to the asylum. Anyway, in the pilot, Ebola hears a little girl screaming, in the house across the street. She believes the girl's parents are abusing her, but her mother doesn't believe her when she tells her about it. Instead, her mother sends her over to the house with a gingerbread cookie for the neighbors. On the way there, she encounters a creepy boy named Smirk, who tells her some troubling things about the family across the street. But Ebola doesn't like Smirk, and would rather not believe his story. So she continues on her way...

I don't want to spoil what happens after she gets to the neighbors' house. I will say none of it really surprised me, but... it was definitely, as I said before, creepy and twisted. And what's perhaps even creepier is that we're left wondering whether it even really happened, or was just the product of Ebola's own twisted imagination. Either way, you've gotta feel bad for her having to experience stuff like this....