The Fuzzies Lands in The New York Times

There are milestones you plan for when you shoot an independent film, and there are milestones you don't dare put on the whiteboard. This one belongs to the second category. On July 17, The New York Times featured The Fuzzies in its "Five Horror Movies to Stream Now" column, placing the film I photographed alongside studio releases like Obsession and the new Silent Night, Deadly Night.

Critic Erik Piepenburg, whose horror column is one of the most-read genre roundups in the country, situated the film within the current wave of horror built around creepy children's television, naming it an inventive supernatural comedy in that tradition. For a movie that started as a short shot in a single bathroom, sharing column space with a $370 million blockbuster is a surreal kind of validation.

As the cinematographer, what stood out most to me is what stood out to him: the craft. Piepenburg praised the film as a "visual feast" of furry monsters, practical effects, and stop-motion animation, the exact handmade toolkit director Josh Funk and our team committed to from day one. Every creature in the frame was built, puppeteered, and lit as a physical object sharing space with our actors.

He singled out one of my favorite sequences to shoot: Dustin Vaught's showdown with a killer towel and a terrified little fuzzball (Affectionately nicknamed the Poop Puppet) hiding in the toilet. That scene was our love letter to Evil Dead 2. Drawing on the careening energy of Raimi's Ram-Cam, we made the camera as unhinged as the puppets, and keeping the frame alive through all that slapstick was some of the most demanding work I've done.

The review isn't a puff piece, and I wouldn't want it to be. Piepenburg notes that the film takes its time before the horror fully arrives. That slow build was a deliberate choice, giving the audience time to sit inside Miss Shirley's world before it turns on them, and I understand it won't be every viewer's pace. But he closes on the ending, describing a final note that puts genuine human sorrow on a fabric face. That sentence alone tells me the film landed the way we hoped it would. Underneath the felt and the fake blood, this was always a story about friendship, grief, and the things we bury.

The Fuzzies is streaming now on Tubi, with the NYT piece running in the print edition on July 18.

If you don't have a subscription, no worries. Here's a screenshot of the article: