Dead Grandma



A woman leaves her young son with her mother so that she and her husband can go on a two week retreat in a location where they will be unreachable. Before leaving she calls her mother to thank her for watching her son, not knowing that she’s going to be in for an unpleasant surprise once she returns home…



Dead Grandma is a horror short written and directed by Rachel Kempf and Nick Toti for the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, and was inspired by Toti’s experience working at a preschool in the mid-2010s. At only 80 seconds long, it’s probably one of the shortest shorts I’ve ever covered here for Shorts Month. In fact, it’s so short that it’ll probably take less time for you to go and watch it than it would for you to read about me telling you about it. But even with its incredibly short runtime it still ends up being an effective little chiller.



The film consists of only one shot. That’s it. You open up on a close-up of Grandma’s face. She is lying prone on the ground, unmoving. Eyes open, but unseeing. It is clear she is no longer with us. Perhaps this has just happened. Perhaps it has been a little while. We do not know. All we know is that the phone is ringing.

As we begin to slowly zoom-out from Grandma’s face into a wider shot of the room, we see toys lying about. Did Grandma just give out, or did the toys contribute to this tragedy. Again, we do not know.

The zoom-out continues and eventually we see a small child. Possibly 2-years-old, but likely younger. They are playing with some other toys, oblivious to what has happened.

As the zoom-out unfolds amongst the scene, the ringing stops and the answering machine picks up, and it is then that you realize not only why this is a horror movie, but that it is only a taste of the true horror that awaits. Then the phone call ends and the screen goes black.

You can watch the short on Youtube here: