"Kidprint"
Written and directed by Alex Ross Perry
In the fall of 1992, an American town is rocked by a series of disappearances of local children and teenagers, who are later found disfigured and murdered. Tim Kaplan runs a local video store where he films "Kidprints", documentary videos that can be used to identify and help search for missing children. Tim and his wife are haunted by the reports of children disappearing and showing up dead with extensive mutilations, and want to protect their two daughters.
During a sparsely attended Halloween gathering in the town square, Tim is told by a mother and a police officer that 17-year-old Olivia Hamel has gone missing. The officer asks Tim to return to the store and retrieve the backup for Olivia's Kidprint. At the closed store, he finds several monitors playing tapes of children either being tortured or begging for their lives. He discovers Olivia in the back, where his employee Bruce Dittman is terrorizing her.
Bruce has been using Tim's videos to locate and coerce children so he can torture and kill them in the store while it is closed during weekends. The psychological torture includes forcing the children to stand in front of the same board and height chart used for Kidprint videos, and filming them as they slowly realize their predicament and start screaming. The physical torture involves different forms of mutilation. One, the skinning of a boy named Drew Stackhouse, whom Bruce had lured to the store earlier, is shown. Bruce appears on tape talking to Drew, convincing him to visit the store to play video games, and later slicing skin off Drew's back and face.
Bruce ambushes Tim, beats him, and leaves him wearing the severed skin from Drew's face on his face like a mask. Olivia and Drew are left in the same room. Finding Tim with the facial skin on, they assume he is as deranged as Bruce and kill him. They try to leave, only for Bruce to murder them off-screen. Bruce also films himself in front of the Kidprint board, wearing Drew's face and assuming a vulnerable, adult-fearing juvenile persona. Whether this is meant as a reenactment of trauma he himself endured while trick-or-treating as a child or as simple mockery of his victims is left unexplained.
Tim's body is found, and everyone believes he was the murderer. Bruce tells reporters that he will take over Kaplan Electronics and continue Kidprint, "for the sake of the children". The final scene shows a young girl screaming in front of the Kidprint board on November 4th, confirming that Bruce has continued his killing spree. The camera freezes and zooms in on the girl's face as the footage ends.
