Honourable Mention: Suckablood

On dark stormy nights the Suckablood comes, to those boys and girls who still suck their thumbs…

This is a marvellous short written and directed by Jake Cuddihy and Ben Tillett from 2012. A twisted gothic fairy-tale, certainly, but is it Vamp?

Tilly caught sucking her thumb

It is one that I was tempted to do a ‘Vamp or Not?’ with, but ultimately I didn’t have enough to really investigate the film; barring the fact that there is the name Suckablood, the fact that it is clearly a supernatural creature and it felt at least of genre interest… so an honourable mention it was. My thanks, incidentally, to my friend Teresa who put me on to this.

Samuel Metcalfe as The Step-Mother

As I said this is a fairy-tale and concerns young Tilly (Holly Jacobson), a girl who still sucks her thumbs. Disgusted with this habit, her step-mother (Samuel Metcalf) beats her and then, as it doesn’t seem to dispel the habit, she curses her. Calling on the Suckablood (Robin Berry) to come if the girls should suck her thumb.

The Suckablood

In bed at night, terribly afraid, Tilly wants to suck her thumb but begs the Suckablood not to come and then sucks her fingers instead. The Suckablood does come though, emerging from beneath the bed and then looking under the covers at the girl. Then it is gone but she has sensed it and follows it through the dark house, where we discover Suckablood’s true mission. In many respects the creature looked like an elf/goblin creature and that reminded me of the vampiric creature the Tomtin – a creature associated with Father Christmas.

The IMDb page is here and the full short is on Vimeo, so I have embedded it below:


Suckablood - short fairytale horror from BloodyCuts.co.uk on Vimeo.