Acorde (Wake Up)
2020 · 1m · United Kingdom
Directed by Tiago Teixeira
Genres: horror
A child prepares for sleep; something waits under the bed.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A kid-under-the-bed horror setup that could've been DOA in anyone else's hands, but Teixeira does something genuinely unsettling by refusing to show us the thing—just the aftermath of dread, which is way more subversive than the jump-scare it could've been.
Economical and deliberate; the film sits comfortably in the lineage of psychological horror that trusts restraint, echoing the formal precision of cinema like *The Babadook* while maintaining its own spare, surreal register.
That one-minute constraint forces an almost surgical economy—every frame counts, and Teixeira's choice to end on ambiguity rather than resolution transforms a genre premise into something that lives in the viewer's head long after the screen goes dark.