Cinco

Cinco follows five friends who become trapped in an abandoned nightclub and are attacked by sugar skull ghosts.

We have received some comments letting us know that we confused Cinco de Mayo with Día de Muertos, the day of the dead and to some, this is considered offensive. It was never our intention to offend anyone, we were just looking to blend to two holidays together for a fun, short film.

This short film was the fifth and final short film released as part of 12 Months of Terror, which was never completed.

Cinco follows five friends who get trapped in an abandoned nightclub on Cinco de Mayo and are attacked by sugar skull ghosts. It was made for StabMovies.com to celebrate the holiday and was the fifth short in 12 Months of Terror.

Five friends head out for Cinco de Mayo: Laurel, Tim, Linda, John and Linda's younger sister Sharon. Not everyone is sold on spending the holiday in a nightclub. Sharon is excited about her first club and nervous her fake ID will not work, and Linda warns her to calm down or she will call their mom to pick her up. When they get there, there is no doorman, and they take it as a lucky sign.

Inside, the place is empty. There are no customers and not even an employee, even though this is supposed to be the hottest nightclub in town. The door locks behind them and they are trapped. Then someone notices the bar is fully stocked, so they start pouring drinks, swinging at a piñata and throwing their own party under the Cinco de Mayo banner. Linda keeps asking how they are going to get out while the others tell her to relax and wait for someone to come by.

Something is in the club with them. A sugar skull ghost flickers through the electronics like a bad TV signal, and then two of them appear in the room: Cinco and Cinco dos. Cinco drives her hand through Laurel's back and tears out her heart.

The ghosts pick the group apart and eat the hearts they tear out. Sharon runs at one of them and gets her heart ripped out. John tries to fight one of them, but she catches both of his punches, drives her hand through his chest and rips out his heart. Tim and Linda hide under a table while the ghosts search the room, whispering to each other not to move. When they are found, Tim is pushed to the floor and Cinco dos straddles him, tears open his shirt and rips out his heart.

Linda hides and waits for her chance. She smashes Cinco over the head with a wrench and beats her until she is dead. Cinco dos comes back for her, and after a fight she kills Linda, leaving no one alive. The film closes with a Happy Cinco de Mayo card.

Release & Reception

• Runtime: 9 minutes (9:01 re-release, including end credits)

A teaser trailer went up March 25, 2015 and said the film would come out May 15, 2015. A second teaser, Crawl, went up May 4, 2015 and said the film would premiere at midnight on the StabMovies YouTube channel, so it came out May 5, 2015, on Cinco de Mayo itself.

Cinco was the fifth and last 12 Months of Terror release. The series was never finished.

The short drew complaints for mixing up Cinco de Mayo and Día de Muertos. StabMovies.com posted an apology on the film's page and with the re-release.

The re-release had about 2,900 YouTube views as of September 2026.

Cast

Crew

Production

Cinco started as a different film. Dudley's first idea was a demon that only came out on Cinco de Mayo and killed people. It was to be set in Mexico during a Cinco de Mayo parade, with five or six friends cutting through back alleys, and the whole film was to be in Spanish with English subtitles. A friend was translating the script, but they could not find Spanish-speaking actors, so the idea was reworked into a 12 Months of Terror short set in an empty nightclub. The first draft of the shooting script had only one ghost.

Dudley admits in the making-of documentary that he did no research and mixed up Cinco de Mayo with Día de Muertos, which is where the sugar skull look came from. Some viewers told him it was offensive. The film's page and the re-release carry an apology saying they never meant to offend anyone and only wanted to blend two holidays into a fun short film. The ghosts also borrow from The Ring in the way they appear in electronics, move, and flicker behind a TV static filter.

Mark Haggett found the part through a Craigslist casting post and was cast off a snapshot he used as a headshot. It was his first acting job. The cast held a read-through before filming, and Ashley Younger joined it by video call from Maryland. It was the only StabMovies.com production with John Wallace.

Hilary Lawson lived in Concord, New Hampshire, and got the crew into Tandy's through owner Greg Tandy. They used the back room normally used as a weekend dance area while the front restaurant stayed open, so diners watched actors in skull makeup walk to the bathroom and back.

Everyone expected one night of filming. Dudley wanted Ashley Younger as Laurel to be StabMovies' first Black final girl. Filming ran slow, not everyone knew their lines, and the club closed before they were halfway done. Younger was only in town from Maryland for that one shoot. Laurel had been the first victim and Linda the final girl, so Younger and Hilary Lawson switched parts on the spot. That made Younger's character the first to die. In the doc Hilary says the plan had been for her to play the early victim Laurel.

The rest was shot about a month later. By then the club had built booths into the walls of the back room, so the background behind the actors changes partway through. The crew leaned on wider and tighter shots to hide it.

Nicole Linton had no lines as Cinco and says she drank during the shoot, which got her in trouble when she spoke on camera during Laurel's death. Laurel's death, with the hand coming through her back, took longer to get right than anything else. One cast member spent hours waiting in another room for their own scene.

A foam stunt head was made for the ghost who gets her skull smashed. It was supposed to be Cinco dos: Lindsey Klossner's ghost would eat Tim's heart, Hilary would crack her over the head, then Nicole's Cinco would come back and rip out Hilary's heart. The foam head was painted with the wrong ghost's face, so the ending was reshuffled on set. Dudley says the new version makes less sense, because Linda has to hide and wait, and Cinco dos somehow misses the fight.

Part fifteen of the Behind the Mask documentary series covers the making of Cinco. It features interviews with Joshua Patrick Dudley, Nicole Linton, Mark Haggett, Hilary Lawson and Lindsey Klossner.

Music

The original upload used copyrighted music. The 2020 re-release removed it.

A song about baking, full of sexual double meanings, plays over the end credits of the re-release. The sources do not name it.

Filming locations

• Tandy's (Tandy's Top Shelf), One Eagle Square, Concord, New Hampshire: The empty nightclub, shot in the back room over two nights about a month apart
• A cast member's house: Makeup on the first night

Effects and makeup

Brandon Vesci did the sugar skull makeup. It was one of his first tries at film makeup and took him about three hours for one makeup. He kept the designs black, white and gray instead of the bright colors common in sugar skull makeup, because the ghosts were demons. On the second night he did two makeups in about four hours.

On the first night the makeup was done at a cast member's house, and one of the ghost actresses rode around Concord and walked to the bar in full skull makeup.

Joshua Patrick Dudley made the hearts from gelatin in molds, colored with food coloring. Condensed milk made them opaque instead of clear. Hearts that would be eaten were covered in an edible, sugary gel blood so the actresses could bite them. Hearts that would only be dropped used the regular fake blood.

The foam stunt head for the smashed ghost had its skull design drawn on with Sharpie instead of makeup.

For Linda's final scene a bottle of fake blood was thrown at Hilary Lawson. It hit harder than planned and went into her mouth, and filming paused so she could get a drink.

The ghosts' first appearances use a scrambled screen effect that makes them look like a bad TV signal.

Props and costumes

A piñata, sombreros, streamers and a Cinco de Mayo banner dress the club for the party.

Hilary and Annie Lawson did not own nightclub clothes or heels, so Hilary wore a sequined shirt.

Lindsey Klossner forgot to wear underwear on the day she had to straddle Mark Haggett, so the shot had to be framed carefully around her dress.

The killers

Deaths

STABFLIX

Watch the film

Playlists

• The bonus features playlist

Gallery

Pictures