The Itch: A Gruesome Confrontation with the Inevitability of Death

Gordon Phillips’s 15-minute body horror The Itch taps into our collective trauma of the pandemic and builds up a sparse landscape on which the macabreness of its vision is the only point of activity. 

A young man is dying. Though he (Nate Nagvajara) has no expositor, the state of his body does make it explicit. And it is this dying, disintegrating, and suffering—in increasingly imaginative ways—body, its parts, that the film zeroes in on, while the person they add up to barely counts. The prosthetics are impressive, and creative cuts and camerawork pick up the lag when they are at risk of falling short. 

There are a lot of cameras to pick from; indiscreet and yet useless to Will, the CCTV cameras stare on while things go wrong for him in unexpected ways. There was some kind of plan here, we understand, and with that the plot thickens. You wonder what the original plan was, you wonder if Will is turning into a zombie, you wonder if those things—those gory, repulsive things that happen to Will, that make pain look like a thoughtless by-product if only the intolerable sensations would stop—are part of becoming a zombie. But you understand that the visceral discomfort is not about to end anytime soon. 

There are jump scares, though not quite the obnoxiously in your face kind. The film opts for something a little more atmospheric, more in tune with the set it has created. Whatever else is going on, Will’s bedroom in his house-sized prison looks inspired by First Period architecture. It deepens a sense of distance and isolation, but also makes for beautiful shots, especially when the light hits the walls. 

The answers are jammed into the final act as despair gives way to thoughts of revenge, bringing purpose to assuage the wounds of a lonely death. It is this idea—suffering and dying alone—that roots this film so firmly in the pandemic coloured psyche. Of course, there is the measuring time in blocks of how much Will’s body is falling apart, but we shall leave that gruesomeness to be experienced rather than read secondhand. 

The Itch, though the title may sound relatively innocuous, taps into the intolerability of the sensation to the one at its mercy. Scale notwithstanding, having an itch is a helpless, humbling feeling that answers to no interventions but the desperately fleeting relief of scratching, and even then, it is a cruel play, a bait that makes you believe in the phantasm of easy resolution. A lot like death.

Watch The Itch Horror Short Film Trailer