By Mo Moshaty
Picture (2025) ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐
When antique lover, BRIT, is gifted a vintage polaroid camera, every flash summons a malignant demon closer to its target… her.
At just under ten minutes, Picture wastes no time pulling its audience into a world where nostalgia turns venomous. Brit (Danielle Jalade) receives a vintage Polaroid camera, the sort of charming antique you’d expect to find tucked in a dusty Burbank curio shop. But each flash does more than capture light, it summons something malignant, and creeping closer frame by frame. The result is a taut, stylish short that feels like it could have been lifted from the best of Tales from the Crypt: clever, spooky, and cruel in the way only cursed objects can be.
The film thrives on atmosphere. Cinematographer Damari Butler transforms vintage kitsch into liminal dread, while Anthony Parnther’s swelling score and Mark Todd Osborne’s polished color work elevate the supernatural tension. Jalade (Saturdays, Black Widow, Broadway’s The Lion King) and Jalyn Hall (Till, All American, Shaft) shine at the center, their natural chemistry grounding the supernatural menace in something achingly disquieting; the gut-twisting realization that survival sometimes means choosing yourself over fate.
Only later do you realize that Picture is more than a sharp little scare machine, it’s the work of a director with vision. Sade’ Sellers, a writer, director, producer, and co-founder of the podcast AfroHorror, has built her career on storytelling that examines grief and representation in horror. With producing partners from Horror in Color, Sellers ensures that her sets reflect the future of the genre: diverse, equitable, and intentional. On Picture, she led a 60/40 female-to-male crew ratio and created space for voices often left outside the frame.
Sellers remarked: “Pictures are moments of our lives captured on film… not all memories are good ones.” In Picture, those bad memories don’t just sit in the album, they reach out, grab hold, and refuse to let go. And like the Polaroid at its center, the film leaves you with an image you won’t easily forget.
Picture is a curse you’ll gladly look at twice.
Picture has screened at HollyShorts, the Belizean International Film Festival, Etheria Film Festival (Honorable Mention), and LA Indie Fest, with Danielle Jalade earning a Best Actress nomination at the Chicago Horror Film Festival.
NightTide Magazine 
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