Macabre
2015 · 19m · Portugal
Directed by Jerónimo Rocha, João Miguel Real
Genres: animation, horror, surrealism
After crashing his car on a dark backwater road, a driver spots a mansion in the distance — but his evening has only just begun.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A car crash that opens onto genuine wrongness—not jump-scares, but the kind of surreal dread that makes you question what you're even watching. Portuguese animators doing what horror usually fails at: making the inexplicable feel more threatening than anything explained.
The film executes a disciplined descent into formal nightmare, with animation choices that recall both early stop-motion tradition and contemporary art-house practice, though the surrealist flourishes occasionally overwhelm its structural clarity.
That decision to animate the mansion sequence in a distinctly different visual grammar than the opening—warped perspective, color shift, the dissolution of perspective itself—is the entire film, and it's executed with the kind of restraint that makes a small production feel boundless.