Paco el vampiro
2005 · 18m · España
Directed by Pepe Macías
Genres: comedy, musical, silent
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, whimsical
A silent musical mockumentary asks whether another version of Nosferatu, with a comic twist, could have been made by Murnau himself in Alcalá de Guadaíra. It playfully investigates that unlikely premise.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A Nosferatu riff that's too reverential to actually bite—it's doing the bit about doing the bit, which is fine, but it never commits to the heresy that would make this genuinely weird.
Macías threads an impossible needle here: a silent musical mockumentary that honors Murnau's grammar while dismantling it, all within the provincial specificity of Alcalá de Guadaíra—this is the kind of formally ambitious play on cinema history that rewards close viewing.
The decision to use the Alcalá de Guadaíra location as an almost sarcastic counter-archive to German Expressionism—turning provincial Spain into the unlikely stage for Nosferatu's shadow—is what makes this work at that intimate scale.