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.
Mo Moshaty is an acclaimed horror writer, lecturer, and producer whose work combines visceral storytelling with the psychological insight of her Cognitive Behavioral Therapy background. She has lectured internationally, including as a keynote speaker at Nightmares from Monkeypaw: A Jordan Peele Symposium (Prairie View A&M), No Return: A Yellowjackets Symposium (Horror Studies BAFSS Sig), The Whole Damn Swarm: Celebrating 30 Years of Candyman (University of California), and with the Centre for the History of the Gothic (University of Sheffield). Mo has also presented at the BFI, Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies, and Final Girls Berlin Film Festival’s Brain Binge on women’s trauma in horror cinema, Cine-Excess on The Creepy Kid Horror Subgenre and Mother/Daughter Trauma in Horror, and Romancing the Gothic on Cosmic Horror’s Havoc on The Body Electric Her short film, 13 Minutes of Horror: Sci-Fi Horror, won the 2022 Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Award for Best Short Film. As a core producer with Nyx Horror Collective, Mo co-created the 13 Minutes of Horror Film Fest and partnered with Shudder in 2021 and 2022, while also establishing a Stowe Story Labs fellowship supporting women creatives over 40+ in horror. A member of the Black Women in Horror Class of 2023 and featured in 160 Black Women in Horror, Mo’s short fiction appears in A Quaint and Curious Volume of Gothic Tales (Brigid’s Gate Press) and 206 Word Stories (Bag O’ Bones Press). Her debut novella, Love the Sinner, was released July 5, 2024, with Clairviolence: Tales of Tarot and Torment released in October 2025. The first of her five-volume non-fiction series, The Annex of the Obscure: The Afterlife, will be released in 2027 from Tenebrous Press. As the Editor-in-Chief of NightTide Magazine and founder of Mourning Manor Media, Mo champions marginalized voices in horror. Under her leadership, NightTide plans to launch a film festival in 2028, furthering her mission to reshape the genre through inclusivity and representation.
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