Kachina: Tubi’s Bite Size Terror

Written By Allan Campbell

“Kachina,” the third episode of Tubi’s Bite Size Terror, is the strongest argument yet that a horror short does not need a long runway to land and be surprisingly shocking. Written and directed by Boise Esquerra and produced by Jamie Ohlsen, it takes a familiar premise a content creator restyling a Southwest vacation rental and turns a single act of disrespect into a precise, blood-soaked reckoning. It is the highest-rated instalment of the anthology for a reason.

Chloe Ray, best known as Coco on Fuller House, plays the rental-makeover influencer hired to make a desert house post-worthy. The performance is the right kind of confident: polished, camera-aware, and wholly focused in anything that serve the shot. When she treats the owner’s sacred family doll as clutter rather than as an object with a claim on the room, the episode stops being a satire of staging culture and becomes something older. The violation is specific, and the consequence follows from it.

That specificity belongs to Esquerra. A member of the Colorado River Indian Tribes in Parker, Arizona, and a New York Film Academy graduate with dual MFAs in filmmaking and screenwriting, he has built a career on horror that carries cultural weight rather than borrowed atmosphere. He wrote the shark thriller The Black Demon, which reached number one on Amazon Prime in 2023 and held the spot for seven weeks, and his award-winning shorts Blackwater and Cowboy screened at Austin, Nashville, Bend, and Slamdance. On “Kachina,” screened under his name at Screamfest, he does not decorate the story with vague mysticism. The doll is a sacred family object, the redesign is an intrusion, and the reckoning is the point.

Ohlsen, founder of Ohlsen Productions and credited as producer on the episode, is the partner who keeps that intention intact at short-form scale. An actress and producer based in Los Angeles, she has moved independent genre work from development through distribution, including The Hard Hit, released through Vertical Entertainment and later licensed to Starz. She and Esquerra have worked together before, on stories that treat sacred objects as more than props. Here, that partnership shows in the discipline of the eleven minutes: no false comfort, no wasted setup, and a climax that arrives exactly when the house decides to correct itself.

What elevates the short is the creature work. Benjamin Michael Bayouth and Dillon Wolf Oleata giving the doll a physical presence that digital effects would have flattened. The climax, was a blood fest and a massive shock of real effects and prosthetic. “Loved it!”

Bite Size Terror was built as a showcase for new horror voices, in the spirit of Hulu’s earlier Bite Size Halloween. “Kachina” is the episode that keeps the integrity of horror and the thrill of how something so small can do so much. It is sharp, culturally grounded, and nasty in exactly the measure the story requires. For anyone sampling the series, this is the one to start with.

Where to watch

Chloe Ray

Boise Esquerra

Jamie Ohlsen

Allan Campbell
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