Horrorfest 2013: Little Otik

Here's another, more recent, flick by ALICE director Jan Svankmajer -- LITTLE OTIK, another surreal, creepy flick that verges on horror, blending live action with off the wall stop motion animation.

This time we have the story of a Czech couple who desperately wants a baby, but is having a hard time conceiving. The husband (Jan Hartl) ends up carving a weird-looking baby out of a stump removed from the yard, and much to his chagrin and surprise, his wife (Veronika Zilkova) starts taking care of it as if it was a real child and names it Otik.

It isn't long before the thing does seem to come alive, and this is where the stop motion comes in. The tree stump has one hole in it that it alternates to use as an eye or mouth, depending on what it needs at the moment, with a creepily real looking tongue that's constantly lolling out and a set of chompers that seems a little too animal for a kid.

The stump cries like a baby, gets pushed around in a stroller like a baby and generally acts like a real baby. Except when it comes to food. First, the couple is disturbed when Otik seems to want to eat his own mother's hair and then they're even more disturbed when he eats the couple's cat. It's only a matter of time before the human bodies start piling up.

This is also an apartment horror movie, so we have a whole community of snoopy neighbors that are witnessing the action in one way or another. Chief among them is a little girl (Kristina Adamcova) who reads a fairy tale that has striking similarities to the Otik situation and thinks she's figured out what's going on.

Where things go from there I'll leave for you to discover. I will say this takes the disturbing pieces of ALICE to a much higher level. Again, the movie is funny in parts, and not outright scary so much as it is just vaguely unsettling. The animation is other worldly and creepy, and you always feel a little on edge watching the flick. I guess part of that might be due to the constant baby cries. In that sense it's similar to ALICE -- the animation and sound design keeps you on edge even though nothing particularly frightening happens in the film. You just can't relax.

Eve though the movie has funny moments and is definitely surrealistic, the cool thing about it is that it takes its premise about as seriously as anyone could expect. It definitely exploits every potential aspect of its insane situation and doesn't lack imagination at all.