High Times Puts the Weird Short Films Festival in the Spotlight

PressFestival News

Sep 11

Award-Winning Short Films Featured in High Times

High Times Magazine features the Weird Short Films Festival, highlighting our indie award winners, underground filmmakers, and elevated short cinema.

The Weird Short Films Festival genres are Horror, Psychological Thrillers, B-Horror, and Dark Comedies- cannabis. We built our festival for filmmakers who produce work that enhances the cannabis-friendly experience. Hell yeah!

So when High Times dropped a feature article on our festival, we were beyond thrilled.

Writer Kyle Rosner captured the exact spirit of what we are building here. As Rosner put it, our festival favors "participation over permission" and recognizes movies built on "thrift, nerve, subcultural knowledge, and a willingness to look ridiculous while chasing an image nobody else would attempt."

We couldn't have said it better ourselves.

From freeze-dried cats on Coney Island and Super 8 drag-clown blasphemy to psychological skin-peeling horror and improvised scratch-ticket comedies, our winning directors proved that short film remains the last true wild west of filmmaking. Culture gets stale when everything is sanded down to offend as few people as possible. We prefer keeping the edges sharp.

Award-Winning Short Films Featured in High Times

Le Meow Mort (Graceann Dorse) – Best Use of Challenge
Cocoon (Dominatrix Mara) – Best WTF
Hard Times (Aaron James Bragone) – Best 420 Vibe / Most Elevated Experience
For the Love of Money (Joseph Kowalski) – Best Comedy
Slated (Ed Castañeda) – Best Kill
The Itch (Gordon Phillips) – Best Psychological Thriller
WHATWHATLOVE (Jiajing Ling) – Best DIY Film
Thirst Eye (Jorge Baldeon) – Best Horror
The Cure for the Clinically Unobservant (Aidan Macaluso) – Best Script
The Bloody Tears of Slaughterina (Marina M) – Best B-Horror

Watch: Weird Short Films YouTube Channel. We upload every week.

Pack a bowl, chew an edible, hit subscribe, and let's stay strange enough to make respectable people nervous.

An independent event like this does not happen in a vacuum. We want to extend a huge thank you to our local dispensary partners who help fuel our mission and support alternative indie cinema: Green Apple Dispensary (@green_apple_nyc) and Gotham Dispensary (@gotham.ny). Their backing helps us keep building a platform for boundary-pushing creators and elevated moviegoers alike.

Below are the winners we have posted so far on our channel. Click to watch. We post a film every week, so stay tuned for more winners.