Oats Studios Teases Third Short Film Zygote

A teaser has just been released for the next short film from Neill Blomkamp's Oats Studios, and it looks to be just as gruesome and weird as the previous productions. Blomkamp's experimental indie project has already offered two imaginative and disturbing sci-fi horror shorts, and the footage for this one called Zygote seems to be continuing the trend.

Oats Studios was a project started by Blomkamp to return to his Indie roots and produce experimental film shorts without the involvement of the big Hollywood studios. Through social media and the resulting publicity, he hopes to build awareness and finance for those projects that raise enough interest to make feature-length movies. To that end, the director even made a recent appeal to fans to help him Firebase, a gutsy mix of a Vietnam war-movie which saw a chosen soldier start his battle against an all-powerful River-God, a man who could shed his skin and bring victims back from the dead. There was also a silly, gory 2-minute spoof on kitchen infomercials called Cooking With Bill.

But ahead of the release of Zygote on July 12, this brief teaser of the new film is now online. It's just a couple of seconds of seriously mutated legs stalking across a floor, but it's freaky enough to make you double-take. The appendages are fleshy and appear to be covered with layers of extra feet and skin, and just look plain wrong and grotesque.

According to film listings, Dakota Fanning (War of the Worlds - 2005) will be in the short and it was filmed at a decommissioned Cold War era nuclear fallout shelter previously used by the Canadian government. In simple , a "Zygote" is an egg cell that results from male and female fertilization, and only exists for a short while until the cell starts to divide. This likely indicates that the disturbing clip relates to some kind of cloning or scientific experimentation gone awry and creating the glimpsed creature. But with the craziness and off-the-hook sequences that Blomkamp has exhibited in the previous projects, you can never be too sure where the story is going.

Rakka and Firebase were enjoyable and ambitious shorts, so we're looking forward to this new production. The only real downside is the brevity of the shorts (naturally) and the fact that plot points for the films will only be expanded or resolved if Oats Studios decide to make them into feature-length projects. In the meantime, we'll watch out for the release of Zygote and keep you posted of any further developments with Blomkamp's experimental studio.

Zygote will be available to view on the Oats Studio YouTube channel on July 12.