Mermelada
2015 · 12m · España
Directed by José Mellinas
Genres: horror, mystery, thriller
An urban-legend YouTuber is recording a documentary with his iPhone about the scandal that took place on the programme Asombro Asombro on its fifteenth anniversary: a girl, a dog, jam and singer Micky Parting. On his way he finds Eugenio, a former television network worker willing to show him the video, but things are not what they seem.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A YouTuber chasing urban legend receipts gets pulled into a rabbit hole where the found-footage conceit dissolves into something genuinely unmoored—it's horror that doesn't bother explaining its own logic, which is exactly why it works. Most scouts want their mysteries solved; Felix wants them to unspool sideways.
Mellinas constructs a nested-narrative puzzle with formal precision, each layer of mediation (YouTube, recovered tape, television archive) creating a deliberate distance that recalls found-footage's lineage while interrogating the reliability of the image itself. The symmetry is admirable, if the payoff trades clarity for atmosphere.
The entire film hinges on the moment the YouTuber's iPhone lens catches something it shouldn't—a single cut between his handheld recording and the VHS artifact that destroys the coherence of what we thought we were watching, and that one technical choice crystallizes everything about how image-fidelity becomes proof becomes delusion.