My Pet Norman is a documentary about the summer HorrorBuzz founder Norman Gidney spent pursuing his dream of becoming an award-winning French poodle. It is also the title of a horror comedy short from writer/director Andrew Pledger about a boy with a bit of a monster problem. Norman lives in the boy’s closet, as monsters often do, but instead of haunting the boy’s dreams, Norman seems to have worked out a deal where the boy can keep his life, in exchange for satisfying the monster’s increasingly voracious appetite for Snickers bars (I’m just going to assume this short is not sponsored by Mars, Inc.).

My Pet Norman is as indie as it gets with a budget of roughly $0 outside of the cost of a decent Halloween costume, the camera required to shoot it, and, of course, the cost of the Snickers. Pledger does a pretty decent job with what he has to work with, however, bathing the room in an eerie blue light and lots of close-ups of Norman’s long, bony fingers creeping through the cracks in the door to accept his offering. The use of short bursts of crunchy, distorted synths adds some punch to these sequences and the sounds of the door creaking are placed front and center to ramp up the tension. Finding the balance between creepy and comedy is always an interesting challenge and My Pet Norman doesn’t do a bad job of it, though I do wish it had a bit more substance and surprise.