The Stoning of a Temptress

What you're actually getting into

A teenage girl is executed in a desert by her own father and brothers. Then something ancient wakes up. The Stoning of a Temptress (2026) is a 13-minute horror short that doesn't flinch from its premise — the violence isn't the climax, it's the inciting incident. What follows feels less like revenge and more like reckoning. Geological. Slow. Already decided.

This isn't a comfortable watch, and it doesn't pretend to be. Director Omid Iranikhah shoots the whole thing in black-and-white, widescreen, which strips away any cinematic softness. The desert stretches. The stones fall. And then the earth remembers.

Who made it and where to find it

Omid Iranikhah wrote and directed this as a thesis film through his company, Stray Cats Productions. Principal photography happened in January 2025 in Mojave, California on a tight $30,000 budget — which explains the formal choices, not as constraints but as arguments. Every frame counts.

The cast anchors around Reagan Beatrix as The Temptress (a name imposed by her killers, which itself is the point), with Andy Stetkevich as The Father and Andrew Scott Terrell, Jacob Kjarval, and Chase Blanchard as the three sons. What's peculiar — and deliberate — is the soundscape. The dialogue's in Farsi, performed by Nazaneen Colton, Kourosh Parsapour, Erfan Shahsavari, and Milad Dylan. A U.S. production in Persian. That collision of geography and language is doing thematic work.

The film premiered April 10, 2026. Streaming availability is still settling (check Movie OTT's where-to-watch tracker for real-time platform listings, since short films migrate unpredictably). It's indexed on Plex, but you'll want to verify what's actually active in your region before searching.

Why this 13 minutes matters

The formal restraint is what makes it land. No jump scares. No score swelling over the violence. Iranikhah doesn't cut away or look for your sympathy — he just holds the frame steady and lets you sit with what's happening. The black-and-white palette means there's no red blood softening the geometry of the act. It's almost documentary in its refusal to aestheticize.

Reagan Beatrix carries a burden most actors would struggle with. She's almost entirely passive — a character with almost no agency in her own story — yet she has to carry the moral weight. What's striking is how much interiority she communicates despite the script giving her almost nothing to say. That's a performance choice, not just a line reading.

I keep coming back to Andrew Scott Terrell's casting as The Innocent Son. That title alone tells you something's wrong with his innocence. He participates in the killing while the credit signals his complicity is supposed to be complicated. It's quiet work, but it's doing a lot.

When the supernatural element arrives, it doesn't announce itself with genre grammar — jump cuts, sting sounds, the usual vocabulary. It feels earned. Ritualistic. Which fits a film whose whole thesis is "The Earth Remembers." The earth here isn't passive. It's a record-keeper, and it collects debts.

The thematic weight

For under 15 minutes, this thing carries surprising density. Religious authoritarianism. The way family structures sanctify violence. Patriarchal control dressed up as duty. The supernatural as the only justice available when human systems fail. None of these are new ideas — but setting the story in a dystopian American desert changes the landing. It's not a distant problem anymore. It's here.

Iranikhah's Iranian-American background shapes how he frames this. There's specificity in choosing to tell this story as a U.S. production, in Persian, about American religious violence. Hard to say if that intentionality reads immediately to everyone watching, but once you notice it, you can't unsee it. The film is arguing about where these dynamics live and who's willing to acknowledge them.

Movie OTT's curators flagged this one early precisely because it's doing something genuinely particular with its setting and form — not just horror-for-horror's sake, but horror as moral reckoning.

Should you watch it?

If you want horror that's actually about something — that trusts its audience to sit with discomfort without looking away — yes. If you're looking for jump scares or a cathartic revenge arc, no. The film doesn't give you the satisfaction of seeing the perpetrators punished in any conventional sense. The punishment is something slower, stranger, and more final than that.

Expect to feel unsettled rather than scared. Expect to think about it after it ends. And expect that the 13 minutes will stick with you longer than most feature-length horrors manage.

You can track streaming availability in real time through Movie OTT — it's worth checking back if your usual platform isn't carrying it yet, since short films tend to surface in unexpected places (anthology collections, curated indie shorts programs, director spotlights). The availability picture likely shifts in the next few months.

FAQs

Q: Who directed The Stoning of a Temptress?

Omid Iranikhah, an Iranian-American filmmaker and founder of Stray Cats Productions. It's his thesis film.

Q: How long is it?

13 minutes. Short runtime, significant thematic payload.

Q: What language is the dialogue in?

Farsi (Persian). The film is a U.S. production shot in California, but the language choice is intentional and integral to how it works.

Q: Is it based on a true story?

No — it's original fiction. That said, it engages with real-world practices of gender-based religious violence, and the choice to set it in dystopian America rather than a distant location is clearly pointed.

Q: Where can I watch it?

Streaming options shift weekly for short films. Your best bet is checking Movie OTT's current listings for real-time availability across major platforms. Plex has it indexed but active streaming status varies by region.

Q: Is this film family-friendly?

No. It depicts violence against a minor. This is adult horror for a specific audience.

Thirteen minutes. That's the whole ask. And in that window, Iranikhah delivers something most feature-length horror films chase for two hours — a genuine sense that violence has consequences, that the world is paying attention, that some debts don't expire. Not a comfortable experience. Shouldn't be. But if you're hunting for horror that's actually about something — patriarchal control, the fiction of innocence, supernatural justice as the last resort — this is exactly the kind of short that earns its place in the conversation.