Demeter Lorant (born 1982, Hungary) is a director, writer, and animator whose career began in 1999 with his first amateur horror short, Picnic, followed by a series of short films. In 2003, he directed his first professional short, Lag, which won Best Editing at the New York Short Film Festival. He continued exploring the horror genre with two self-financed, more abstract works, Royal Flush and Urine. In 2005, Lorant began developing the feature project Block-66, which ultimately remained unrealized. Shifting focus, he delved into animation and visual arts, directing over 50 music videos for indie bands and becoming a leading projection mapping artist. In 2010, he founded Full Screen Studio, which grew into one of Hungary’s top visual content production companies for events and projection mapping. Lorant returned to horror filmmaking in 2015 with Lucky Girl, inspired by 1970s Exploitation Cinema and the French New Wave Extremism. His 2020 sci-fi short, Possessed by Aliens, a family-friendly story about a boy and his alien-possessed grandmother, gained wide acclaim, screening at over 40 festivals worldwide and earning numerous nominations and awards. In 2023, he achieved his biggest success yet with SILEO, an animated sci-fi short based on the Ship of Theseus thought experiment, earning selections, nominations, and awards at major genre film festivals globally. In 2024, Lorant and his producing partner, Gábor Sz. Nagy, completed their first feature-length arthouse horror film, Dreamland Awaits, now in post-production. They also filmed Through the Eyes of Lóránt, a documentary about Lorant’s father, a renowned Hungarian painter, alongside a documentary about indie filmmaking. With multiple projects in post-production and new films on the horizon, 2025 is shaping up to be a very busy year for Demeter Lorant.
