Nymphal, Joe Pellegrino’s surreal psychological horror short, is now available to stream free worldwide on YouTube, following an acclaimed run on the global genre festival circuit.
NYMPHAL (2026) — Key art. Courtesy of Joe Pellegrino.
Nymphal drops viewers into a pressure-cooker of escalating dread set in a secluded rural backyard. A father and daughter find themselves trapped in their trailer lot, contending with local murder mysteries, their own fractured relationship, and an aggressively encroaching wall of bamboo. As the deafening, omnipresent song of cicadas builds to a crescendo, it heralds something truly bizarre. Critics have compared its atmosphere to Lynch and Lovecraft in the same breath — Embrace the Film called it “Lynch meets Lovecraft,” while Horror Madness called it “a slow burn mind fuck.”
Pellegrino wrote, directed, and composed the music for the film, handling nearly every creative layer of the production. A multi-disciplinary filmmaker recognized on the indie genre circuit, he brings a distinctly auditory voice to the project — the cicada soundscape alone is a character unto itself.
Nymphal accumulated an impressive international trophy case before its YouTube debut. In the U.S., it won Best Short at the BizarroLand Film Fest in Orlando and Best SFX at the Stranger Days Independent Film Fest in Charlotte, North Carolina, while earning nominations for Best Music and the WTF Short category at Atlanta’s Buried Alive Film Fest. Internationally, it swept Best Director and Best Music at the Bloodstained Indie Film Fest in Tokyo.
Nymphal is streaming now, for free, on YouTube. Follow the film on Instagram at @Nymphalfilm.
