TL;DR: There are films—real or imagined—that burrow into your skull and refuse to leave. Two of them have been gnawing at me for decades: Doorbell (That *might* be its title), a suburban horror so stark it feels like a punch to the solar plexus, and a stop-motion chicken short so unhinged it might’ve been a fever dream broadcast by the CBC in the ’80s. Long lost media from late night TV. If you’ve seen them, or if they’re just figments of a collective cultural hallucination, I need to know. The internet has failed me. The archives are silent. And yet, I swear, they exist.
The Doorbell That Never Stopped Ringing
I’ve spent years chasing a film that may not exist.
I do that. It’s a bad habit, or maybe a compulsion — hunting down the half‑rotted scraps of cinema that flashed across my childhood like lightning and then vanished without leaving so much as a scorch mark. Over the years I’ve tracked down most of them: the obscure, the misfiled, the forgotten, the ones that aired once at 1:17 a.m. on a Tuesday and were never seen again. With enough digging, enough stubbornness, enough willingness to stare into the dust‑choked corners of the cultural attic, they eventually turned up.
Except for two. Two that continue to slip through my fingers like they’re doing it deliberately.
The first… well, its name might be Doorbell. Or maybe that’s just the sound it left echoing in my skull—a shrill, insistent little tyrant that refuses to fade, like a telemarketer who won’t take no for an answer.
The era was late-70s to possibly early-90s, that golden age of suburban dread when horror wasn’t about jump scares or CGI gore but about the quiet, creeping realization that the American Dream was a Ponzi scheme with a white picket fence. The film stock looked like it had been stored in a damp basement beside a stack of unpaid bills—grainy, yellowed, the kind of visual texture that makes you feel like you’re watching something you weren’t meant to see.
The plot, if you can call it that, was simplicity itself, cruel in its efficiency:
A man—middle-class, middle-aged, middle-of-nowhere—wakes to the doorbell. Not a knock. Not a polite ding-dong. A doorbell. That specific, electric BRRRRING that sounds like the house itself is having a nervous breakdown. He drags himself downstairs, moving with the exhausted resignation of someone who already knows the universe isn’t calling with good news. The bell keeps ringing. Louder. Faster. More demanding. As if the house is panicking.
He opens the door.
A masked man. A shotgun. A single, decisive blast.
End of film.
No moral. No explanation. No post-credits scene where the killer monologues about his tragic backstory. Just the universe shrugging, turning off the lights, and leaving you alone with the echo of that doorbell.
I’ve scoured the internet. I’ve asked film historians. I’ve even, in a moment of desperation, posted in a Reddit thread about obscure horror shorts that have aired in Canada during that era. Nothing. Either Doorbell is the most perfectly hidden film in history, or it’s a shared hallucination—a cultural ghost story passed down through the oral tradition of insomniacs who grew up watching late-night TV.
But here’s the thing: I need to see it again. Not because it’s good (though it might be). Not because it’s important (though it feels like it is). But because if it doesn’t exist, that means my brain is capable of inventing something so viscerally unsettling that it’s haunted me for decades. And if that’s the case, I’m not sure I want to know what else is lurking in there.
The Chicken That Would Not Die (Or: The CBC’s War on Childhood)
Then there’s the other one.
A stop-motion short. Canadian, probably. The kind of thing the CBC used to slip into late-night programming back when public broadcasting still had the guts to traumatize children for free. I think it aired on The World’s Worst Film Festival, which was either a real television show or a collective hallucination shared by anyone who grew up in Canada between roughly 1978 and 1983.
The opening shot: a close-up of two eyeballs, darting around like they’re trying to escape their own sockets. A heartbeat thumps underneath—loud, wet, insistent. Then the camera pulls back, and there it is: a cleaned, plucked chicken (or maybe a turkey) sitting upright in a roasting pot, staring back at you with those frantic little eyes someone had lovingly jammed into its torso.
After that, the memory dissolves into the kind of fog that suggests either trauma or bad broadcast reception. I’m fairly certain the bird climbs out of the pot—stop-motion herky-jerky, limbs bending in ways poultry was never meant to bend—and staggers around the kitchen like a resurrected dinner with unfinished business. A sort of Gallus Gallus Lazarus on mission to avoid the fate of a torturous basting ritual. I think it ends with a cleaver dropping from off-screen, cleaving the bird in two. A punchline with no joke.
I’ve described this film to people. Some of them nod knowingly and then say “No idea. Never seen it.” Others look at me like I’ve just confessed to seeing Bigfoot in a hockey jersey. But here’s the kicker: I’m not sure it was ever real. Maybe it was just some fever dream conjured by the Canadian airwaves—a glitch in the matrix of my childhood, a moment where the signal got crossed and my brain decided to invent something so bizarre it had to be real.
And yet.
And yet.
There’s a part of me that knows this film exists. Not just in my head, but out there, somewhere, buried in a CBC archive or a VHS tape in a thrift store in Saskatoon. A part of me is convinced that if I could just find it, I’d finally understand why it’s haunted me for so long.
The Archive of Unreliable Memory
So here’s my plea: If you’ve seen Doorbell, or the chicken short, or anything even remotely like them, please tell me. If you know where they’re hiding, if you’ve heard whispers of their existence, if you’ve ever woken up in a cold sweat because a doorbell wouldn’t stop ringing or a chicken wouldn’t stop staring—get in touch.
Because here’s the thing about these films: They’re not just movies. They’re cultural artifacts, the kind of thing that gets passed around in hushed tones, like a secret handshake for people who grew up in the shadow of late-night TV. They’re the reason we still check the closet before we go to bed, even though we’re adults now. They’re the reason we flinch when the doorbell rings unexpectedly.
And if they don’t exist?
Well.
That might be even more terrifying.
The Unanswered Question (Or: Why Do These Films Feel So Real?)
There’s a theory—half-baked, probably—that these films do exist, but they’re not meant to be found. They’re like urban legends, or creepypastas before the internet made creepypastas mainstream. They’re the kind of thing that gets passed down as memories through generations of insomniacs, each one adding their own details, their own distortions, until the original is lost in the static.
Or maybe they’re just glitches in the cultural matrix—moments where the collective unconscious decided to invent something so perfectly unsettling that it had to be real.
Either way, I’m not giving up.
Because here’s the thing about these films: They’re not just stories. They’re experiences. They’re the kind of thing that can really stick to your internal occipital protuberance, that lingers in the back of your mind like a half-remembered dream. They’re the reason we still believe, deep down, that the scariest things aren’t the ones we see, but the ones we almost see.
And if that’s not worth chasing, I don’t know what is.
Epilogue: A Call to the Culturally Haunted
So if you’re out there—if you’ve seen Doorbell, or the chicken short, or anything even remotely like them—please, for the love of all that is both holy and unholy, tell me. Leave a comment. Send an email. Carrier pigeon, if you must.
Because I need to know.
I need to see these films again. You understand. Don’t you?
Further Reading: Lost Media, Film Archives & Forgotten Broadcasts
If the world of lost media from late night TV, forgotten horror films, forgotten television broadcasts, and strange cultural artifacts fascinates you too, these archives and resources are worth exploring:
- Lost Media Wiki – A massive community-driven archive documenting vanished films, television broadcasts, obscure media, and unresolved mysteries. If Doorbell or the CBC chicken short exist anywhere in the public conversation, there’s a good chance someone here has heard whispers.
- Internet Archive – Prelinger Archives – One of the internet’s richest collections of forgotten film reels, educational shorts, ephemeral broadcasts, and vintage television material. A rabbit hole for anyone hunting obscure late-night media.
- National Film Board of Canada – Watch Films Online – Canada’s definitive public archive for animation, documentary, and experimental film. An essential place to search if your memory points toward CBC-era or Canadian oddities.
- Library and Archives Canada – Film, Video & Sound Archives – Canada’s national archive preserves historic broadcast and audiovisual collections—an invaluable resource for researchers tracking down obscure television history.
- British Film Institute – Explore Film & TV History – A deep archive of film scholarship and television history, especially useful for tracing forgotten horror shorts, genre programming, and broadcast-era oddities.
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