Here Be Monsters

Ryan Phillips opens a British post-apocalyptic Lovecraftian horror series with a first episode, "Strawberries," that runs nearly seven minutes, a long hold for a genre where AI shorts usually run out of coherence after one atmospheric shot. Digital Deity and The Cold Call are here from 2023; he is one of this timeline's longest-serving filmmakers.

It holds because Phillips is a BAFTA-nominated director with two decades in television. Episode 2, "The Watchtower," followed on August 26, five minutes, same world, no drift. The day before, Phillips showed how he turned his dad's drawings into the show's characters. A family sketchbook as the character bible is the kind of source material that separates a show from a demo.