Monsters do not exist (Los monstruos no existen)
2011 · 10m · España
Directed by Paul Urkijo Alijo
Genres: coming-of-age, fantasy, horror
Tones: contemplative, dark, mythic
Nai, a boy in Phnom Penh, suffers nightmares about the Yeak, a Khmer monster that eats misbehaving children, and although his English teacher Michael insists monsters do not exist, the truth is very different.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects a horror film to punch you in the gut, so Alijo does the opposite—he lets the Yeak sit in shadow while the real terror lives in the space between what a child believes and what adults insist is true. It's deliberately uncomfortable, which means it actually works.
Alijo positions this squarely in the lineage of folkloric horror cinema, where the monster becomes a vessel for cultural transmission and inherited fear; the formal restraint—favoring implication over spectacle—grounds the mythic premise in anthropological weight rather than jump scares.
The film's power hinges entirely on the decision to keep the Yeak mostly unseen, letting a boy's conviction and a teacher's rational skepticism do the heavy lifting, and that single commitment to negative space transforms a 10-minute short into something that feels possessed by real dread.