Amancio Vampiro de pueblo
2018 · 16m · España
Directed by Alejo Ibáñez
Genres: dark comedy, drama, horror
Tones: dark, darkly comic, melancholic
Amancio is the last inhabitant of an abandoned village. Gripped by hunger, he awaits the arrival of new victims, but the arrival of some relatives will force him to decide whether the visitors will save him from his loneliness or serve as his dinner.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A vampire film that uses rural Spanish isolation and familial obligation to ask something genuinely unsettling: what's worse, dying alone or eating the people you love? Most horror films would pick a lane; this one lets the absurdity and the dread sit on top of each other and refuse to resolve.
Ibáñez positions this within a lineage of Latin American magical realism and folk horror, using the abandoned pueblo as both setting and character—the formal restraint in how he stages Amancio's quotidian monstrosity suggests a filmmaker aware of how genre tradition demands we *feel* the weight of transgression before we see it.
The entire film hinges on Ibáñez's choice to play Amancio's hunger—literal and existential—with genuine pathos rather than spectacle; it's a 16-minute performance study that makes you complicit in his loneliness before the premise's moral trap snaps shut, and that tonal precision is doing all the heavy lifting on a minimal budget.