I lost track of the body count of "Damnationland," a program of seven short and locally-grown horror films screening across the state from Thursday-Saturday, about halfway through its second installment, Kate Kaminski's 20/20, a subdued dystopic yarn beholden to The Stand and The Road. Even better, the influences throughout are refreshingly diverse, leaving little room for redundancy: while two disquieting films, Jeremy Alexander and David Camlin's Undone and Torrey Alan Johnson's Shambles, play a bit like the logical end result of Memento; Christian Matzke's Last Call takes a few cues from Shaun of the Dead; and the wry and effective closer Humoresque, by Allen Baldwin and Jayson Lobozzo, is, in its surprisingly large heart, a buddy comedy. If genuine scares are in short supply, both Nick Poulin's Consumption and Jeff Griecci's A Bell in the Yard, prove pretty suspenseful. In a pinch, "Damnationland"'s Black-and-Blue Ribbon goes to the latter, in which a Dickensian type is charged with tending to a graveyard in case any recently buried bodies were put under a bit too soon. The suspected corpses have strings on their wrists attached to above-ground bells, employed to effects both and comic and a bit nerve-wracking. Both Mr. King and Mr. Poe would be proud.
