Horror Short Review: The Penny Man (2021)

Penny, penny, give me three, and your nightmares I shall take from thee. Penny, penny, give me two, fail me and I will come for you…

By Jonnie Stapleton who co-wrote it with Domenico Grasso comes The Penny Man. A phenomenal horror short that will get the hairs standing up on the back of your neck.

Set in an early period of time (let’s just call it the olden days), a mother and her young daughter are playing some sort of game that surrounds the legend of the Penny Man. The mother gives her daughter a bag of buttons with three pennies inside and stands on the other side of a closed door. She knocks three times before repeating the first part of the rhyme above. It’s the girl’s job to slide a penny under the door. Do this three times and The Penny Man will go away.

It’s a chilling concept enhanced by your expectation that it’s going to go wrong. Which it does but unlike many other horror ideas, The Penny Man keeps its monster mysterious and it’s all the better for it.

This is a horror short that will scare you through build, lighting, shadows and music. Over its 6-minute run, it delivers several genuinely scary moments that will you have desperately searching your pockets for 3 pennies.

The last shot of the short might make it a little harder to sleep tonight. Check it out below.