The year is 1981. No shoulder is unpadded, large crystals hang from delicate necks, and swooped bangs curtain women’s faces, held aloft by Farrah Fawcett-strength hairspray. News flashes on a static-filled screen of the sudden death of much loved (and fictional) Sacramento children’s TV star Miss Shirley — “Drysdale’s Death Makes the Sun Shine Less” reads the headline of The Sacramento Bee-spoofed newspaper, “The Sacramento Examiner.”
This is the sinister world of “The Fuzzies” (2025), a horror-comedy that follows three childhood friends as they search for Miss Shirley’s television co-star — a puppet named Sally — in Miss Shirley’s summer house deep in the woods.
Filmed and produced in Butte County, director and Chico native Josh Funk conjures candy-colored horrors as “The Fuzzies,” as Miss Shirley called them, turn on the hands that command them. A film and animation professor at Chico State, Funk delivered the film’s jump-scares through tactile stop-motion animation, a technique that emphasizes the texture of real objects which are moved in tiny steps and photographed one frame at a time…