Conception (2025) – For Your Consideration
Runtime: 12minutes, 31 seconds
Dir: The Mooncats
Starring: Eva Hamilton, Samm Todd
Shot on Location in Las Vegas, Nevada
Motion Picture Trailer: https://vimeo.com/1092667118?share=copy#t=0
In the aftermath of the American democratic collapse and a rise in unexplained electromagnetic activity, a recently widowed woman begins sifting through the remnants of her late husband’s life.
Among his belongings, she finds a life-sized alien prop — the kind often carted to fringe conspiracy conventions in the mid-2020s.
The short arrives from The Mooncats, a newly emerging collective with a growing reputation for moody, economical genre work. Their latest effort feels as if it were unearthed from a dusty 1979 film can — visually vintage, yet clearly set in our modern moment.
Cinematic references are worn lightly but deliberately — Kubrick, Faye Dunaway, Ennio Morricone, Dean Cundey.
Rather than leaning into pastiche or nostalgia, the film delivers something more elusive — a feeling of temporal displacement, of cultural memory collapsing in on itself. It’s a work that merges Cold War eeriness with contemporary residue, quietly alluding to trauma, domestic loss, and post-truth anxiety.
There’s also a subtle nod for genre fans: Samm Todd makes a brief but memorable appearance, invoking her iconic role from Trick ’r Treat (2007) — not as a cameo, but something more ghostly.
