Histeria
2017 · 12m · Honduras
Directed by Marlon Abel Herrera
Genres: drama, horror, thriller
Baltasar, a growing artist, shows poetic work to friend Gary, who scorns the poems, and the pair comes to blows. Baltasar wins, leaves Gary's house, and meets something terrifying on the road.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A poem-reading artist gets his ass kicked by a philistine friend, then encounters some undefined terror in the dark—it's *exactly* the kind of tonal whiplash and genre refusal that makes most scouts nervous, which is precisely why it works. Herrera doesn't care about coherence or landing the horror beat cleanly; he just keeps destabilizing you.
The turn from domestic conflict to supernatural dread shows formal awareness of mood architecture, though the final pivot feels more impulsive than considered—there's a lineage of surrealist horror here (Buñuel, Polanski), but Histeria doesn't quite commit to the grammar of either tradition.
The sound design choice in the final sequence—that specific shift from naturalistic ambience to something abstracted and wrong—is what elevates this from a premise into an actual film; everything before that moment is setup, but that audio decision is where Herrera proves he understands how to make dread on a shoestring.