Phyllis
2010 · 16m · Nigeria
Directed by Zina Saro-Wiwa
Genres: experimental, fantasy, horror
Tones: dark, melancholic, surreal
A 'psychic' vampire living alone in Lagos, obsessed with synthetic Nollywood dramas, moves through a world of wigs and the supernatural.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A psychic vampire obsessed with Nollywood melodrama is exactly the kind of premise that makes you pause—it refuses to pick a lane, mashes supernatural horror with media satire and Lagos specificity, and somehow it works because Saro-Wiwa treats the absurdity as completely legible. Most scouts would call it scattered; that's precisely why it's brilliant.
Saro-Wiwa positions this work within a lineage of African experimental cinema that interrogates genre and spectacle, and the formal restraint—the way synthetic drama and supernatural dread are allowed to coexist without resolution—demonstrates a sophisticated understanding of how surrealism functions as cultural critique rather than mere style.
The decision to filter the supernatural through Nollywood's aesthetic grammar—those wigs, that melodramatic cadence—becomes the entire film's DNA; it's a single formal choice that reframes what vampire mythology can mean, done on what's clearly a minimal budget but with the precision of someone who knows exactly which image carries the weight.