Baby Tooth - Short Film

Baby Tooth is a surreal body horror film which follows May on the day of her best friends' wedding - when her teeth suddenly begin to wiggle and fall out. Baby Tooth aims to distill down the universal tooth nightmare into one chaotic day, and explore what it feels like to believe there is something deeply, terribly wrong with you.
To bring these tooth nightmares to life we need your help. We are working with an extremely talented prosthetics artist, and we need your help to take the prosthetics from concept to reality. The money we raise will be distributed to make the in-camera prosthetics shine, as well as support in providing our crew and cast with delicious food throughout our 3-day shoot. In line with the concept of - go big or go home - Baby Tooth is an ambitious project and we would appreciate any support possible to make it a reality. 

Gaze Films and our darling director Raph coming together is all about whānau and friendship, which for us are one! We’re long-term best friends with a hope and a dream to make meaningful films that speak to our experience together as women. Each of us are filmmakers, writers, directors, producers, while also hustling in our day-jobs on-set and in the odd office. Whatever it takes to keep the wheels turning. Our films get made in the in-between - late nights, early mornings, lunch breaks and the moments between hui. And one day it’ll be an every day, all hours affair 🙂

As everyone knows - filmmaking is expensive! Our goal is to make Baby Tooth a truly excellent and unique film, and to make that happen we need to equip each department with the resources to succeed. 

This 8K goal will go towards: 

- Tooth prosthetics (created by the extremely talented Bill Hunt down in Wellington, who has worked on iconic projects such as District 9 and Lord of the Rings!) 
- Delicious crew meals (cooked by Raph’s incredible sister Maia)
- Musical score (everyone knows that this genre doesn't sparkle without some tension-building soundtrack) 
- Hiring extra assists to make the day run smoother for everyone

Message from Raph: I first wrote Baby Tooth about 5 years ago, and has reworked it about 5 million times. I wanted to write something about the sensation of everything falling apart, completely out of your control - just like in the quintessential (and somehow universal) tooth nightmare. I've always been inspired by surreal films like Big Fish and Beasts of the Southern Wild, and I am obsessed with the visceral elements in films like The Substance and Swallow. I found that the further I pushed the surreal and body horror elements in Baby Tooth, the more satisfying and complete the ending became. 

Baby Tooth takes a universal but rarely spoken fear — that something is deeply wrong with us.

By turning the familiar tooth nightmare into surreal body horror, the film makes internal anxiety visible, visceral, and surreal. It’s about the gap between how we see ourselves and how others see us. 

This work needs to be experienced because it gives shape to something many people feel but struggle to articulate. We want to invite our audience to sit with discomfort, recognise themselves in it, and maybe question it too.

Supporting our film Baby Tooth means backing bold, women-led storytelling that embraces the weird and wonderful to tell something raw and honest.