Poetry, Prose, & Peonies

This is a review of the short film Short Drop. If you’d like to access the film please click the link below. This article contains spoilers.

Short Drop

Heat lingers in the twilight of an evening spent writhing to the bass of speakers larger than a house. Gathered at a muster point, there is nothing but empty roads and deep brush hosting the sound of cicadas and the shuffle of a mystery animal moving through the trees. 

One by one, friends get into cars. Her friends call out, making sure she has a ride home – as with any place, it can be dangerous on a dark and desolate road. She waves and nods her head, waiting alone.

This is where our story begins. 

Trinidadian filmmakers Romario Reyes, Mary-Rebekah Reyes, and Israel Silva took a local Trinbagonian folktale and told it in visual form. Short Drop was officially selected under the Caribbean Tales International Film Festival, Film and Folklore Festival, and the Trinidad Tobago Film Festival in 2023. This film lives up to the word horror. 

Like many other Trinis, I am enthralled by our folklore. It runs deep through the streets, seeming to saturate our nation with magic and mystery. Short Drop follows in the footsteps of this oral tradition.

Our main character, a nameless girl, stands at a crossroads wearing a tank top and a skirt cut short over one leg and draped over the other. Her curly hair was covered by a purple sunhat. I remember thinking on the first watch how out of place her hat was in the context of her outfit, how perfectly odd it was that she covered her head in the coolness of the evening. I dismissed it because her friends also wore a sunhat, I assumed as a remnant of a day at the beach, or a day down the islands. But in fact, it was my first clue. 

The Reyes-Reyes-Silva team worked in tandem to create a visual suspense. The cinematography and direction brought the script to life. I didn’t know why, but I was afraid for this girl.

A white Nissan Tiida shows up, a quintessentially Trinidadian car, and stops for this girl.  I loved that it was a Tiida that stopped for her. Any person who’s lived in Trinidad can say it’s usually the Tiida drivers that stop for hitch-hikers. This detail gave me a sense of place, a sense of Trinidad. The culture of hitch-hiking is still alive and well in certain areas of the country. 

Our main character gets in the car and asks to be taken to Connector Road in Chaguanas. We’re taken on a journey with the girl and the driver, a man who asks too many questions. The blue and red backlighting added an ominous nature to the conversation that may have otherwise been harmless. 

This film challenged my biases about gender dynamics. A young girl is picked up by a random man who’s too curious, eyeing her like she’s something to eat, and telling her it’s not safe to be out at night. The tension was mounting, and I instantly placed myself in the situation, feeling the fear of being in a strangers car at night. What would I do if I had to hitch a ride home? What would I do if the man was asking too many questions? How would I respond if I felt unsafe in a moving car?

The man seems interested, and I perceived that interest as danger. While everything he was saying was truly harmless, concerned that she was alone in the middle of nowhere, the shots were cut in a way that raised my pores. His eyes in the rearview mirror – mirrors are a classic way of denoting a hidden intention – and the girl glancing around the car, avoiding the questions and his gaze, the discomfort of an unwanted interaction. 

I should have known from the hat. 

The film swerves when the man stops at Connector Road in Chaguanas. Not a house, not a light, not even a dirt path for the girl to find her way out. I kept thinking to myself, my god, why is she doing this? Why did she take this random man to the middle of nowhere after dark?

The music shifted at the same moment her eyes turned a pale shade of yellow, and for the first time since the beginning of the film, her hidden leg is revealed. 

The leg of a goat. 

For any of you who may not be deeply steeped in Trinbagonian folktales, this goat leg is a symbol of Ladjabless, also known more formally as La Diabless. Due to the oral nature of this folktale there are many spellings of the name including Ladjablès, Ladjablesse, and Lajabless. This story is one I know well, and many of my family and friends have recounted experiences and tales of their own about the goat lady. She is a demon who roams a specific crossroad in San Juan, a crossroad I have seen in the daytime when visiting my aunt in the mountains. 

The hat was not solely a symbol of Ladjabless, but also a literary symbol of power and authority. She was in control the whole time. As soon as the girl got into the car, she removed her hat which I interpreted as an act of feigning vulnerability, disarming the man, and using silence to make him, and the audience, believe that he was in the position of power. 

Short Drop brought to life a nightmare I’d had many times over. A woman turned demon, seeking the blood of men who prey on women in the night. Some would say she’s not a villain or a devil, just a woman in control of her own destiny, a woman that could protect herself. But in this specific iteration, I believe the man was a genuine person concerned for the safety of this girl he was dropping home. 

I said this film highlighted for me my own preconceived notions on the dynamics of gender. I was afraid for the girl. But if I had only paid attention, if I had only noticed her shiftiness sooner, the way she looked at him, the way his concern was not taken seriously, the fact that she had taken him to a desolate road in the bush of Chaguanas, I would have seen it sooner. If I had only listened to myself and taken the oddness of her hat seriously, I would have been afraid for him. 

In a genius subversion of gender dynamics, Romario Reyes made me believe that she was an innocent victim, when in fact she was always the predator. The driver truly was a harmless man picking up a girl to take her home at night, yet Ladjabless had found her next victim. 

Ladjabless, the she-devil, lives in the oral tradition of our twin islands. Every Trinbagonian knows her name, and where she roams. Like I said, we all know someone who knows someone, who’s convinced their car was kicked in with the shape of a hoof. There are even oral tales of people ending up in hospital with injuries from being attacked when they got out of their cars to help her. This tale is as old as the roads themselves. 

This folktale dates back to the 1700s. Many French settlers came to the Caribbean, namely Martinique and Trinidad and Tobago, under Spanish rule. The West African influence cannot be understated here either. In every version of the story, Ladjabless is an African woman. There is something steeped there, something deep and historical, the folktale comes out of a time of slavery, a time of violence and desperation, an era of magic and obeah.

The legend depicts a young enslaved African girl who makes a deal with the devil for eternal beauty. She is turned into a demi-demon, an immortal who has spiritual power. Her power is that of seduction, of luring men into dangerous situations, taking them deep into the jungle, driving them off a cliff, and seducing them to their deaths. Some iterations of the folktale say that Ladjabless only comes out during the full moon, while some locals believe she comes out when there are men to prey upon in the night. 

La Diablesse is an archetype of a folkloric figure, a woman standing at a crossroads, a woman who hates men, a woman who is more dangerous than the road she stands on. She roams in the night, luring men who would harm vulnerable women to their deaths. 

La Diablesse is associated with the French Creole culture located in Martinique and Trinidad and Tobago but there is another iteration of the story known as Um Al Ihmar (Donkey Lady) in Bahrain, and Um Homar in Qatar. These stories are reminiscent of the myth of Hecate, the goddess of witchcraft standing at a crossroads, the mother of women who have been sexually assaulted. 

This “she-devil” subverts the traditional stories around violence against women and turns the tables onto the men that prey on them. Much like the spirit of Ladjabless, this subversion of gender dynamics is key to the film.

This film was a brilliant local telling of a folktale we all know well in Trinidad. Folktales are oral traditions, the stories passed down through generations from one voice to another. Short Drop presented an audiovisual format that preserves the integrity of oral rhetoric while putting a fresh visual twist to these traditions. Future generations of Trinbagonians will forever have access to our tales.

Not only was Short Drop filled with literary references and dramatic tension, it was nuanced, true to the folktale, and presented in a fresh way that tricked even a primed audience, just as Ladjabless can trick even the most primed Trini to step into her clutches.