I first saw Mamá on YouTube back in 2013 and I can remember having trouble sleeping afterwards. This is atmospheric, scary and in your face. The images you see here will stay in your head no matter what. There's no going back after watching this. Three minutes is the perfect length for this little horror gem.This is far greater than the feature that followed. I have revisited it many times and when you know the outcome, the tension is palpable.Highly recommended. Tip: watch it late at night and alone under a blanket with the lights turned off.

What started off as a short, became a feature length movie. And Guillermo Del Toro was the one who saw the potential in the movie. In both movies so to speak. The general idea is simple and yet very horrifying. Having two children in peril will work most of the time. Shooting this like it is one take (great effects doing that and the other things in the movie) was genius too.Of course there are more takes, it's very complicated, but also very short and you get the feeling of dread and fear. Saying more about it, would spoil the "fun" you could have watching it. The good thing is, it doesn't matter if you watch this before watching the feature length movie or afterwards. The movie itself is kind of absorbed as one scene in the movie ... though it has a small difference ...

I saw this film short as an "extra" on the DVD for the feature length movie of the same name, by the same writers. The extra, with Del Toro's introductory comments, is about 5 minutes. The short film itself is right at 3 minutes.It's really only an idea, actually. We see two small girls in a large, two-story house. The atmosphere is spooky. Then we see the ghost figure "Mama" rushing towards the girls as they run up the stairs to safety. Hopefully.Del Toro came across this short and was impressed enough to contact the writers, a brother and sister team, to see if they might write a feature length film on the same theme.And they did, the 1 hour 40 minute horror movie "Mama." Which I enjoyed, BTW, even though it is not a genre that I am usually drawn to.

Mama (2008) *** (out of 4) Andres Muschietti's three-minute short is what helped get his 2013 film made. Fans of that film (whick I'm one of) will certainly want to watch this just to compare how the sequence here looked in the feature. What we basically have is two little girls walking around their house when they notice mama and try to get away from her. This scene was actually redone in the feature to a very good effect and considering this thing just lasts three-minutes there's really no reason to try and treat it the same as a feature. With that said, I was actually quite impressed with this short as the director at least managed to build up some tension and the pay-off was nice. I will also admit that I actually liked mama from this short better than the feature, which was good but often times relied on too much CGI. Both Victoria Harris and Berta Ros are good as the children.