El Zipe
2016 · 8m · México
Directed by Esbeín Liévano
Genres: fantasy, horror, thriller
Ana is a waitress closing the café where she works one night when strange things begin to happen: spilled flour, appliances switching on by themselves, footprints on the floor. She is being haunted by the Zipe, a childlike demon from southern Mexican legend, and her nightmare is only beginning.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Every other horror short wrings scares from jump cuts and sound design; Liévano just lets a waitress close a café and trusts the folklore to do the work—which is exactly why it feels genuinely unsettling instead of manufactured.
The film positions itself within a lineage of Mexican folkloric cinema, but what's curious is how it resists the baroque visual grammar you'd expect; instead it finds restraint in the mythic, letting legend breathe through domestic space.
The decision to keep the Zipe mostly unseen, letting footprints and displaced objects carry the haunting, transforms what could be a standard creature-feature into something that lives entirely in Ana's perception—and that constraint is what makes the 8 minutes feel genuinely claustrophobic.