TWO SENTENCE HORROR STORIES – created by Vera Miao – SPOILERS

Each of the episodes is a short film roughly twenty minutes long, and is in the middle of a two sentence story. The first sentence, shown at the beginning, is the setup, and the last (the twist) is shown at the end. For instance, Episode One, titled GENTLEMEN, begins with “She was stiff and cold in my arms”, and it is completed at the end with “And then the doll blinked.” (That’s the first episode available on Netflix. Five others preceded that one, but they are apparently nowhere to be found.)

Some stories are social commentary. In HIDE (Episode 1.4, directed by Rania Attieh and Daniel Garcia) a violent and bloody home invasion is used to illustrate the plight of immigrants in America. IMPOSTER (Episode 2.4, directed by Jennifer Liao) stars Lou Ticszon as an Asian-American investment adviser who finds his ambition literally in conflict with his Asian heritage.

Other stories are modern interpretations of horror classics. CRUSH (Episode 3.1, directed by Kailey Spear and Sam Spear) stars Jacqueline and Joyce Robbins as sisters Mabel and Jane Laurent and is an effective homage to the 1962 Bette Davis/Joan Crawford movie “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?“. TEATIME (Episode 3.4, also directed by Spear & Spear) is about Sam (Christina Orjalo), a young woman who takes a job babysitting a spooky little girl obsessed with her doll collection. That one brings to mind the 1963 Twilight Zone episode “Miniature“.

The strangest and most puzzling of all these tales has to be PLANT LIFE (Episode 3.2, directed by Vera Miao). Christian (Donald Heng) is a workaholic who has managed to alienate his boyfriend Ben (Michael Ayres) by continually paying more attention to his job and its associated technology than to their relationship. On their anniversary, Ben gifts Christian with a plant that looks a little bit like the carnivorous one in LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS, and comes with a note saying: “Rescue Plant: You take care of me; and I’ll take care of you.”

Christian has the best of intentions. The reason he’s working so much is to buy a “dream house” where he and Ben can live together. But Ben knows nothing of this, and when their anniversary celebration is interrupted by Christian’s work, Ben suggests they need a break from their relationship, and walks out. After Ben leaves, the sometimes Triffid-like plant (symbolically?) pricks its new owner with thorns a few times and Christian tries to toss it in the trash, but it climbs out somehow during the night. Next he tries to kill the thing using salt and vinegar, but that just makes it more agressive. When Ben returns, somewhat apologetically, to give him another chance, he finds Christian lying in a bathtub, in the process of turning into a human/plant hybrid.

The ending (if you don’t want to find out about that, stop reading here) shows Ben and Christian at the “dream house” for which Christian worked so hard. The setting is bucolic, and Christian has (literally) put down roots by a large tree. Ben feeds him plant vitamins laced with sugar as a treat, then sits near him and reads him a story. Did the thorns of the plant contain something psychotropic? Might Ben have been affected by the chemical first, but in an entirely different way?

Creator Vera Miao told Heather Wixson of Daily Dead that she discovered the concept of the Two Sentence Horror Story by reading the ones that went most viral on Reddit. “The two sentences are badass,” she said, “and then there’s the subversion of that setup, so it gave me all this freedom to think about characters, issues, fears, scenarios, and context that were interesting to me, but also there’s this underlying scalable structure to it…The genius of these stories is that they give you so much in so little, so it’s like this adrenaline shot into your imagination.”

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TWO SENTENCE HORROR STORIES can be streamed on Netflix (US).