“Since I was a child, I always loved telling stories and performing,” recalled writer, filmmaker, and director Scarlet Moreno, adding, “I had an incredible cultural upbringing of dance classes with Altagracia Azios García and Cheryl Kirkpatrick, and voice lessons with Kathy Proffit from the age of nine until I left for college.
“I was blessed with parents who supported my move to New York at the age of 18 to study at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, where I completed a BFA in Drama and Journalism. It was scary for them to have me go so far away. That measure of love was huge for me,” she continued.
After completing her studies at Tisch in 2011, she moved to Los Angeles to begin a career in directing, writing, and acting in films of her own creation.
Moreno considers herself a feminist “who centers the female experience in unexpected and creative ways” — including horror, a genre valuable to her work, she said, “for the juxtaposition between the beautiful and the harrowing.”
The energy of that juxtaposition drives the drama of Velma, the 14-minute short that she wrote, directed, and in which she played the lead. The story builds with calibrated tension and suspense with a series of male callers who arrive at her home individually for sumptuous suppers, but are never seen leaving after dancing to Moon River playing on the hi-fi and the repeated visual of a polished brass faucet being opened to fill a tub.
Men 1, 2, and 3 who have visited her separately and in sequence are seen only as mouths, chins, backs, chests, and hands, and if whole, as blurred faces — except for the last visitor who is seen in full and is handsome and has kind eyes.
There is no audible dialogue between Velma and her visitors, but there are brief monologues of her anguished diary entries and some sobbing.
The departure of the last caller makes quite a revelatory splash in the tub, unleashing the heretofore unseen, un-articulated denouement of the drama between Velma and her four visitors.
In a 2024 online interview with Rue Morgue, Moreno said, “Ultimately, Velma asks its audience to examine what they find worse in a woman: promiscuity or blood lust.” She continued, “Sex and sexuality and their expression have been weaponized against women for centuries, a double-edged sword that aims at those who are not sexual enough and those who are deemed too sexual. I’m excited for audiences to enter Velma’s world and watch as she dances on the edge of that sword.”
Velma, which debuted at Panic Fest in 2022, was recognized with Film Quest’s 2023 award for Best Costuming-Short, Underworld Film Fest’s Banshee award, Arthouse Film Fest’s Fellini Award for Best Art Direction, Nightmares’ award for Best Cinematography, and Sin City Horror Fest’s award for Best Editing.
Moreno credits her childhood friend Chaine Leyendecker for Velma’s brilliantly overstated costuming.
Another of Moreno’s shorts is a comedy called Little Lucha and the Big Deal. Set in St. Paul, Minn. in the 1980s, it is the story of two dejected wrestlers who have not made it in professional wrestling, she for being a woman, and he for being diminutive.
Moreno is the Big Deal and Josh Stifter is Little Lucha. The two met in 2018 when they were selected by filmmaker Robert Rodriguez to be in the series, Rebel Without A Crew.
Moreno and Stifter wrote and directed this comedy that evokes not only laughter, but also empathy for the two wrestlers whose dreams of success seem out of reach. Moreno and Stifter are the beating heart of this story.
Moreno is currently in post-production for Money’s Tight, a musical thriller. She is in pre-production for Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night which will premiere in Los Angeles in early June. She will play Olivia and will also produce and lead production design.
She and her husband Kody Harms, a therapist specializing in neurodivergence, are the parents of Oscar Dean Moreno Harms.
