Haiek
2025 · 3m · España
Directed by Gartzen Zarraga
Genres: experimental, fantasy, horror
Twelve mythological beings converge from the forest on an abandoned Basque farmhouse to prepare a ritual banquet whose main course is a fragile figure in a nightgown, culminating in a sacrifice by fire.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Zarraga takes the playbook of folk-horror and inverts it—not haunted house but haunted *ritual*, not victims but a conclave of mythological beings treated with bizarre matter-of-factness as they choreograph a sacrifice that feels simultaneously intimate and cosmic. Everyone else is watching the nightgown figure; Felix is watching the twelve.
The film positions itself deliberately within the lineage of Spanish surrealist cinema and contemporary European folk horror, with the formal restraint of its 3-minute structure bearing the weight of pre-Hispanic ritual ceremony translated through an almost Buñuelian domestic lens.
The decision to film the convergence as a slow, silent procession from forest to farmhouse—bodies entering frame with liturgical precision rather than chaotic threat—transforms what could've been cheap creepshow into something genuinely mythic, and that compositional choice alone justifies the entire premise.