Hell West
2017 · 15m · España
Directed by Fran Mateu
Genres: fantasy, horror, western
Sheriff Marty Mc Gregor suffers an Indian curse, and wife Connie Malone must hide Marty until the sentence ends. Relief comes when day embraces night and the last crow falls in the cursed town of Hell West.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A Western possessed by horror logic—Indian curse, daylight-trapping, crows as countdown—that refuses the genre's usual moral scaffolding and just lets mythic dread eat the premise whole. Most scouts see westerns and think redemption; Mateu sees them and thinks *entrapment*.
Mateu works within a recognizable hybrid lineage (horror-western, folk-curse cinema) but the staging feels oddly muted, the editing measured rather than propulsive; there's formal intelligence here, but it doesn't quite justify the tonal weight it's asking the viewer to carry.
The decision to hide Marty—to make the curse a domestic imprisonment rather than a duel or a reckoning—transforms the western's typical exteriors into claustrophobia, and that single narrative pivot does the heavy lifting on a clearly modest budget.