El tren de la bruja
2003 · 18m · España
Directed by Koldo Serra
Genres: experimental, horror, thriller
Tones: dark, provocative, tense
A man volunteers as a guinea pig in an experiment on human behavior under extreme terror, agreeing to sit alone in a dark room in exchange for a large sum of money.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Serra takes the tired 'locked room' premise and inverts it into something genuinely perverse—the real horror isn't what happens *to* the subject, it's the contractual exchange of dignity for cash, and watching an audience squirm at that bargain is exactly the kind of subversive inversion most scouts would bury.
The film's formal restraint—its commitment to the single room, the durational tension, the sparse sound design—locates it in a lineage of experimental psychological cinema that prizes endurance and implication over spectacle, a choice that demands real rigor in execution.
The decision to keep the experiment itself mostly *off-screen* and let dread accumulate through sound and the actor's internal reactions is the move that distinguishes this; lesser filmmakers would've scored jump scares, but Serra trusts silence and a performer's face to do the work.