Gossip Goblin’s short film Woodnuts throws you into a hypnotic mix of sci-fi and cosmic horror, where a struggling laborer finds himself spiraling into the eerie depths of an alien forest.
Desperate for credits, the character signs up to extract psychoactive sap from the forests of Jatar. But things take a terrifying turn when the trees start whispering. Lured deeper into the woods, he’s not just hearing things, he’s experiencing the forest’s memories firsthand, revealing a haunting vision of humanity’s rise and ruin.
The synopsis reads: “A punch-burn laborer joins a hazard crew harvesting psychoactive sap from the forests of Jatar. Seduced by whispers from the ancient trees, he’s lured into the deep woods and consumed by the forest’s memories, witnessing the terraforming of the planet at the hands of ancient humans, the rise of a paradise on a once barren world, and humanity’s ultimate destruction by the very ecosystem they engineered.”
Directed by Zack London, Woodnuts is both visually hypnotic and narratively unsettling, an AI-rendered short that doesn’t feel sterile or artificial. It’s steeped in emotion and environmental dread, pulling off that rare balance of artistry and sci-fi worldbuilding.
It doesn’t waste a second of its runtime, layering in cosmic horror elements with hallucinatory visuals to tell a bigger story about human arrogance and ecological collapse.
Set between the Eleventh and Twelfth Cycles of Humanity in the larger Thirteen Cycles of Humanity series, Woodnuts acts like a memory fragment from a much larger timeline.
It taps into something primal and strange, capturing the terrifying possibility of nature fighting back through the quiet, eerie persistence of a world humans thought they had mastered. It’s an ambitious short with a wild premise, and it sticks the landing.
