![New 13-Minute Horror Thriller Is Officially the Perfect Bite-Size Halloween Treat [Exclusive]](https://www.mogazmasr.com/uploads/2026/10/15/remain-calm-a0a862c3_800w.webp)
Collider has exclusively presented Remain Calm, a 13-minute short horror film that lands like a Halloween-season jolt rather than a slow burn. It stars Nick Swardson, Pauly Shore and Doug Jones, with Pauly Shore and Swardson playing gas station clerks on the night shift while Jones shows up as a government agent with a warning they cannot afford to ignore.
That setup is exactly why people are looking at it now. Remain Calm is being positioned as a quick horror watch for the season, the kind of compact release that can be consumed in one sitting and still leave a mark. The film’s creature, Mr. Frett, is played by Kevin Keppy and is built around a simple nightmare rule: it devours anyone who gives off even a trace of stress, fear or anxiety. In other words, the title is not just a joke. It is the survival instruction.
Jake Lewis wrote and directed the short, and he appears to have built the whole thing around that contradiction. He said the idea of forcing people to answer true horror with aggressive positivity was what made him laugh, and he described the film as a metaphor for society at large. That reading gives the story more bite than a standard creature feature. The monster is not only hunting frightened people. It is punishing the one emotional response the world has been demanding from them: the performance of calm.
Shore brings the cast’s most direct personal thread back to Lewis. He said he was excited to work with the writer-director again after having so much fun on The Court Jester, where he played Richard Simmons, and he said he was equally eager to work alongside Swardson, whom he called one of his favorite comedy brothers. That history helps explain why the project feels built on comfort even while the premise leans into panic. The people on screen know one another, but the situation they are trapped in does not care.
The friction inside Remain Calm is what keeps it from sounding like a clean comedy-horror gimmick. It asks its characters to behave in the exact opposite way a horror story trains people to behave. Instead of screaming, they are supposed to steady themselves. Instead of panicking, they are supposed to smile through the terror. That is a neat concept for a 13-minute film, and it is probably why the short can work without padding: every beat is doing double duty, as a scare and as a joke about how hard it has become to look composed when everything is falling apart.
Whether the short grows beyond that is the question left hanging after the unveiling. Shore said he would be ready to sign up if Remain Calm were expanded into a feature, but nothing in the presentation says that will happen. For now, the film is a self-contained Halloween release, tight enough to play fast and strange, and pointed enough to make its title feel less like advice than a test.
