Rodrigo Goulão de Sousa’s Short ‘Uncanny Alley’ Finds Horror In The Mundane Moments Of Daily Life

The eerie short film Uncanny Alley arrives online via Adult Swim’s Smalls shorts program. Make sure there’s a light on before you dive into this one.

Without giving away too much, let’s just stay that there’s a horrifying-looking man-creature lurking at a woman in an empty cinema, wormlike creatures bubbling to the surface, distorted bloodied bodies, floating corporeal structures, bedside critters, and a tricycle riding frog.

If Charles Burns and David Lynch were melded together, they ooze out in the form of animator Rodrigo Goulão de Sousa, whose urban horror short combines three stories: “The Screening,” “The Night Shift,” and “The Roommate.” Like Burns and Lynch, de Sousa finds his horror in the everyday and in the seemingly mundane moments of life: a cinema, a swimming pool, an apartment.

What elevates the film beyond typical shock fare is the masterful pacing and sound design (courtesy of Jérémy Ben Ammar). There’s a continual, disturbing quietness and stillness that keeps you constantly on the edge, never quite certain what is coming next.

De Sousa, a Portuguese director and animator who lives in France, is a graduate of the acclaimed French school Gobelins where he co-directed the film Tales of the Salt Water (2021) His work can be found on his Youtube channel, which has recently been hacked, according to his X account:

@TeamYouTube my yt channel (https://t.co/gFNvrX9a2e) / google accounts have been hacked and all ways to recover them have been blocked by the hacker.

I have 174k followers & part of my salary comes from yt.
Is there any way to get my account back?

Please share& retweet thx

— rodrigosousa (@rodrigo09078701) August 20, 2024

He is currently working on another horror-themed work, The Playground, with an eye towards making it into a feature film.