BEC (Black Eyed Child)
2018 · 9m · España
Directed by Tony Morales
Genres: drama, horror, thriller
Since 1998, appearances of black-eyed children have recurred, with irreversible consequences for anyone who looks directly into those eyes. On a stormy night, a woman with terminal illness receives a visit from such a child, accompanied by a malignant entity.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Finally, a film that treats the urban legend premise as genuinely *weird* rather than just spooky window dressing — the inversion of a dying woman as the one who gets to choose her exit is exactly the kind of subversive moral logic that makes genre conventions collapse into something unsettling.
Morales demonstrates formal restraint in the service of dread, with a clear lineage to folk-horror and creature-feature traditions, though the emotional weight it tries to carry through the terminal illness subplot occasionally strains against the spectral machinery.
The decision to shoot the black-eyed child with absolute stillness — no twitching, no uncanny valley tricks — lets the surrounding chaos do all the work, and that compositional discipline on a limited budget is what makes the surrealism actually land.