Eight minutes of stop-motion body horror that'll make your skin crawl off and join a cult.
OPERATOR is a stop-motion animated short film about a man named Bob, who is attacked by a bio-mechanical parasite, and has to fight for his life and family against forces much greater than himself.
Practical Effects
Grotesque puppet work that puts CGI to shame.
Direction
Barnett squeezes feature-length dread into eight minutes.
Director
Sam Barnett
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Barnett created the film as a proof-of-concept for a feature, spending over a year on eight minutes of footage. The parasitic 'Operator' was designed to mirror call center headsets, literalizing corporate possession.
The film emerged during peak gig economy anxiety (2013-2016), prefiguring modern 'always on' work culture horror like Severance. Its practical effects reject the clean digital aesthetic of Pixar-era animation for something aggressively tactile.
US
