Something creepy crawled out of a lake
…and it’s going to escape.
Our folk-horror short NIX has been officially selected for MACABRE & MAYHEM [esc] fest Season 3, Escape’s Halloween festival. On Friday, 30 October, a Swedish water spirit with a violin and a very long smile joins a lineup of the strangest, darkest short films made with AI this year.
We’re in very good (and very scary) company.
What MACABRE & MAYHEM is
MACABRE & MAYHEM is the Halloween festival from Escape, the neo cinema platform founded by John Gaeta. This is its third season. The programme is short films in the darker corners: mystery, horror, psychological, thriller and “bizarro”.
The screening itself is the fun part. It happens in Escape’s Interactive Online Theater, a multiplayer 3D cinema that runs right in your browser. You walk in as an avatar, take a seat and watch with everyone else. If you’re on a phone or tablet, there’s a Twitch livestream instead. No downloads, no app.
Before the show, the Creator Club opens for voice and text chat with the filmmakers. It stays open afterwards too. So you can watch a film about a monster and then ask the people who made it what on earth they were thinking.
We love this format. A festival used to mean a plane ticket. Here, anyone with a browser gets a seat in the same room, which feels very right for a medium that’s being built by a global community.
NIX, in three minutes
NIX is a folk-horror short about a water spirit who teaches a young man the violin, for a price.
In Swedish folklore, Näcken (the Nix) sits by streams and waterfalls and plays so beautifully that people forget themselves and walk into the water. Every Swedish kid grows up with him. He’s one of the scary fairy tales told to keep children away from deep water. We wanted to make him as unsettling on screen as he was in our heads at seven years old.
NIX is also the pilot for BERGTAGEN, our anthology series built on Swedish folklore: ten stories about the creatures in the lakes, forests and mountains, and what they take from the people who meet them.
Horror and folklore suit AI film perfectly. Both live somewhere between dream and image, where things are almost right and a little wrong. That uncanny edge, which people often call AI’s weakness, is exactly what a good monster needs.
NIX has already had a good autumn. It screened at the Science Museum IMAX in London and came second at Big Screen Hack, by 0.1 points. Now it gets to haunt a virtual cinema on Halloween weekend, which is honestly where it belongs.
How to watch
| Date | Friday, 30 October 2026 |
| Time | 12:00 noon PT / 20:00 Stockholm |
| Pre-party | From 11:30 PT in the Creator Club |
| Where | Escape’s Interactive Online Theater (desktop) or the Twitch livestream (phone/tablet) |
| Tickets | Free, but limited: get your free ticket here |
Big thanks to ESCAPE AI MEDIA, John Gaeta, Kris Michael and Loucaros (Luke) Eleftheriou for having us in this lineup.
Come watch with us, if you dare.
— Christian, The Awarehouse Studio, Stockholm