Toxoplasma does not jump out to scare you. It slowly seeps into your bloodstream and alters the way you think about horror, and maybe about yourself.
Directed by Robert Giles and Dwyer O’Brien, this 45-minute psychological descent follows Jordan, a young man unraveling after trauma. What begins as a meditation on loneliness takes a disturbing turn when he forms a bond with a parasitic organism. The creature does not attack him. It waits. It understands. For the first time in his life, Jordan feels seen. This isn’t conventional body horror. There are no transformation scenes, no shrieking possessions. The fear emerges through sterile visuals, haunting voiceover, and a growing sense that the worst things are not visible. Jordan narrates his descent with a detached calm that makes the film feel more like a confession than a story.
A quiet exchange as Jordan sits with a friend, hinting at the film’s underlying tension and emotional fragility.
“…he forms a bond with a parasitic organism.”
A standout sequence involving a dead rat, a syringe, and a ritual of sorts pushes the film from uncomfortable to unforgettable. It is grotesque, but never gratuitous. The intimacy of the moment makes it more painful than shocking. The parasite is never framed as evil. It is something more ambiguous—a stand-in for inherited pain, internal rot, and the dangerous comfort of surrender. There is no clear resolution. No one is rescued. And that is the point.
Toxoplasma trusts the viewer to sit in discomfort. It does not handhold or explain. It simply presents a mind and body in slow collapse, asking what it means to be inhabited. This is horror at its most personal. Quiet, clinical, and disturbingly intimate. This is not horror that wants to startle. Toxoplasma wants to stay.
"…This is horror at its most personal. Quiet, clinical, and disturbingly intimate."
