La vampira
2002 · 14m · España
Directed by Sergio Boj
Genres: action, fantasy, horror
Tones: dark, theatrical
A girl who has just got engaged is turned into a vampire by a Civil War-era vampire; after killing her boyfriend she wanders the city leaving corpses behind, until Azrael, the vampire who made her, arrives and she seeks revenge for her dead lover.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A 2002 Spanish vampire film that doesn't give a damn about making its protagonist sympathetic—she kills her boyfriend, goes on a rampage, then pivots to revenge theater with her maker. It's got the theatrical darkness of early-2000s European horror before everyone decided vampires needed brooding origin stories, and that refusal to moralize is exactly why it shouldn't work but does.
Boj channels a lineage stretching from Spanish Gothic through Almodóvar's operatic sensibility, constructing a revenge narrative that treats vampire mythology as theatrical scaffolding rather than horror machinery; the formal control here—pacing a 14-minute arc from engagement to vendetta without wasting a frame—places it squarely in the tradition of purposeful European genre work.
The masterstroke is the tonal pivot halfway through: the film commits entirely to the girlfriend's agency and rage rather than dwelling in the victim moment, and that single structural choice—refusing the expected trauma trajectory—is what elevates this from genre pastiche into something with actual weight.