It’s undeniable that 2024 has been a big year for horror, from The First Omen and Longlegs to Alien: Romulus and, more recently, Smile 2, there have been tons of scary movies to thrill audiences. However, we can’t leave out all the incredible short horror films that have dropped as well, including Keep Coming Back, from Slashtag Cinema, a production company started by three friends Travis Bacon, Kyle Kouri and Dylan Garrett Smith.
In Keep Coming Back, a group of strangers at an addicts support group sit and share their stories. Without spoiling the story, we’ll just say that eventually one of the strangers, Paul, begins to show his darker side and things get… messy.
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Paul is played by Kouri, who also served as director, with both Bacon and his sister Sosie — children of actors Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick — also starring in the short film. While sharing about where they got the idea for Keep Coming Back, Kouri explained, “I just had this image kind of pop in my mind one day of a guy who drinks and the more he drinks he starts to transform.”
“I brought that to Travis and Dylan, [and] we started developing a character who has a drinking problem and his drinking problem developed in horrific ways,” Kouri added. “I think things kind of fell naturally into place from there. I started to see this character as like a classic antihero. I’ve always been fascinated by not only antiheroes but also the culture antiheroes.”
“I wanted Paul and keep coming back to be kind of like not the antihero you see in a movie, but the guy that’s sitting around drinking IPAs not doing anything with his life, maybe has aspirations but never follows through with them… Probably knows everything about every Christopher Nolan movie,” Kouri continued, “My idea was: What happens when you put that guy in the driver’s seat of a story and how does that go to his logical extreme?”
Bacon, Kouri, and Smith started Slashtag Cinema back in 2022, and while Keep Coming Back is far from their first project, it’s certainly the first one to make such a big splash. The film has screened at ScreamFest LA, FilmQuest, and Hex After Dark this year, with the film picking up two award nominations at FilmQuest: BEST ENSEMBLE CAST – SHORT and BEST ACTOR – SHORT for Kouri.
In addition to co-producing/co-writing and starring in Keep Coming Back, Bacon also did the film’s score. Bacon already had a few other film-scoring projects under his belt — not to mention playing in bands like Black Anvil and Contracult — but was ready to expand his horizons.
“I had befriended this composer named Tyler Bates and was talking to him about, you know, trying to break into like the horror genre more as far as like composition goes… I had already started composing for films but the ever usually for like dramas and romantic comedies,” Bacon recalled. “Tyler made the suggestion of trying to film some sort of content and like put music over it, like… film some trees rustling in the wind or something.”
“I thought about taking that a step further and I reached out to Kyle and just see if he wanted to film a couple kill scenes or something and I could make some music to it,” Bacon went on to share, noting that Kouri “had an idea for taking a step further” and involving fleshed-out characters.
Eventually, Bacon introduced Smith and Kouri to one another, and Slashtag Cinema was rooted. “We were doing Instagram and TikTok content, and our whole idea was micro horror and kind of like horror for a scrolling generation,” Bacon explained. “We did that for a little while… But I think we wanted to bring what we were doing to a little bit more of a longer form media and… have the opportunity to go to festivals like we’re doing now.”
When it comes to their horror film festival experiences, Bacon and Kouri told us it’s been “surreal” but “so much fun” due to how the horror community is “very supportive” of one another. “It just felt like people excited about each other’s work and excited to premiere their own work,” Bacon said.
At this time, Keep Coming Back is not streaming, but the Slashtag guys say they’re working on a way to make it available for more people to watch. In the meantime, horror fans can click here for links to keep up with them on social media.
