Cigarette Burns

Kirby Sweetman owns an independent movie theatre and deals in rare film prints to keep it running. A wealthy collector named Bellinger hires him to track down the only surviving copy of "Le Fin Absolue du Monde," a film said to have been shown just once, at a screening where the audience turned violent before the cinema burned. Kirby takes the job, and the search itself grows increasingly strange as he closes in on the print and on what the film does to the people who watch it. Norman Reedus plays Kirby, with Udo Kier as Bellinger, alongside Christopher Redman, Chris Gauthier, Zara Taylor and Gary Hetherington.

The film is directed by John Carpenter, working from a screenplay by Drew McWeeny and Rebecca Swan. It is the twenty-first of the twenty-two features he has directed in chronological order, following Ghosts of Mars and preceding The Ward.

Made for television in Canada and the United States and running under an hour, it forms part of the first season of the Masters of Horror anthology, in which each episode was handled by a different genre director, and it was released in December 2005. On TMDB it holds a rating of 7.3 out of 10 from 146 votes, a small but clearly favorable sample that places it among the better-regarded entries in that series.