Calvin Lee Reeder’s short films are gross, violent, quixotic, implausible, and kind of brilliant. In Reeder’s movies, characters are in risk of having their heads suddenly explode or be smashed in by a cinder block hurled by a vengeful poltergeist. In Reeder’s world, a creepy man offers a ride to a hitchhiker and after the hitchhiker sees two mummies in the back of the man’s car, he gets in anyway. One character in The Piledriver, his first short, asks a girl he just met if she has a car. “Does it run?” he asks, as if that were a natural follow-up question. The Rambler, which screens at the Festival this year, features one poor woman whose breasts explode.

It is no surprise, then, that after Reeder gave his mother a copy of Little Farm, which screened at the 2007 Festival and features incest, a goat whose stare has the power to transfix human beings, and the brother and sister’s father downing a bottle of J&B at the dinner table, his mother didn’t have anything to say about it. “I didn’t hear word one for months and then we got into Sundance,” Reeder said. He told her and she was ecstatic. “It’s kind of strange – you never mentioned the movie,” he said to her. “That’s because I don’t get it,” she told him.

Reeder, who was named one of Filmmaker magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film” in 2007, says that his mother “really likes” The Rambler, however. The 12-minute short is the infectiously trippy, irreverent, and engrossing account of one hitchhiker’s day gone horribly, sickeningly wrong. After a misfit scientist picks up The Rambler and explains that the odd contraption in his car is a machine that “records dreams to VHS,” he takes The Rambler to his home, where his beautiful but mentally unbalanced daughter also lives. What follows is a series of overtly atavistic, Freudian events: lizards scrambling across raw meat, feet covered in gooey mud, and a lot of vomitus.

The gross-out factor in The Rambler is Troma-worthy. Reeder grew up in Seattle as a fan of Toxic Avenger, punk rock, and horror movies. Reeder and his former directing partner Brady Hall are the creators of Jerkbeast, which was a public access show in Seattle that allowed citizens to call in to be berated by a potty-mouthed monster (played by Hall). Reeder and Hall later developed Jerkbeast into a feature film. “It’s pretty awful,” Reeder said. “It’s quite bad and in the movie, there’s this band and this band has its own following. We got booked at South by Southwest last year and we were awful. We’ve toured England twice with the band. It’s about the worst music you could imagine.”

Reeder performs in his own shorts (he plays The Rambler), but that’s a product of necessity: “I really don’t love to act or anything, but our films have been budgeted so low that I can’t afford to pay an actor and I don’t really feel right about asking someone to do it for free,” he explained. “Our characters have to go through a lot.”