The Wendigo Drives a Prius: Inside "Vandigo," a BloodBat Honorable Mention

here is a particular kind of BloodBat film that could only have been made under a ticking clock by people with no intention of ever being seen. "Vandigo," an Honorable Mention at this year's BloodBat 48-Hour Film Competition, is one of them: a found-footage horror short about a Vandigo who, for reasons its own creators can't fully explain, has taken up residence in a Prius.

The film is the work of two filmmakers, Emily Weaver and Caitlyn Winters, and it began not with a monster but with a confession. "We've always wanted to make a horror short," they explain, "but when it came down to it, we're both too shy to be on camera. We had to come up with a concept where neither of us needed to be on screen." The obvious workaround (drafting a friendly stranger or two from the convention floor) was, if anything, worse. "We didn't feel right about asking random people to be in our movie either, since we were such cowards, so we settled on a 'found-footage' type of film with no actors appearing."

That single constraint shapes everything about "Vandigo." With no faces to fall back on, the horror had to live in what the camera happened to catch (a duffel bag, a trunk, a license plate, the empty geometry of a parking structure) and in the two disembodied voices arguing their way through it. Weaver takes Director and Writer credits and voices Burglar #1 (and the creature); Winters handles the film's art and camera and voices Burglar #2 (and, also, the creature). Between them they built a whole cast out of exactly no one.

Deciding to make that film, it turns out, was harder than making it. "Unfortunately, we wasted the first 24 hours debating this," they admit, "so we didn't have time to get a duffel bag of fake bones to toss in the trunk." Half the competition gone to deliberation, one crucial bag of bones short, and yet the finished short arrived with its Vandigo intact, its dialogue workshopped in the small hours over Discord, its title creature sketched and colored by hand.

That creature is where their affection plainly lands. "We really liked creating the 3-frame animation of the Vandigo," they say. "He's actually kind of cute, though I have no idea why we settled on 'Vandigo' as his name, since he obviously inhabits a Prius." It is the rare monster whose greatest mystery is not what it wants, but why it was named the way it was.

The judges, for their part, were charmed. "Vandigo" drew praise across the board in deliberations, from the studio team at Buffalo 8 to the director of Et Tu to the HorrorBuzz and MidSummer Scream crews, a strong showing for a film assembled by two people determined not to appear in it.

Following the team's future work is, by design, a challenge. "We're a couple of weirdos who like to hide behind our lack of social media," they wrote, declining any handles or tags. But they left the door open where it counts: "If there's another BloodBat Film Competition next year, we'll throw our hat in the ring, maybe with actual human actors!" And they closed with the sort of note that makes running a 48-hour race worthwhile. "Thanks for hosting the competition. It really got us out of our lazy con-sumer mindset during the convention. Plus, HorrorBuzz's Screaming Room is like 75% of the reason we show up to MidSummer Scream." Their only shout-out, fittingly, goes to their "fellow parking lot pals at the Long Beach Convention Center."

Two filmmakers too shy for the camera, a Vandigo too comfortable in a hybrid, and a bag of bones that never made it into the trunk: "Vandigo" is BloodBat at its best, a film that took everything working against it and drove off with the whole idea.