Sabbat
2014 · 11m · España
Directed by Luis Calderón
Genres: coming-of-age, horror, thriller
Vega is a girl who wants to feel everything; on Halloween night her friend Esther proposes she attend a party that promises to be brutal, and without knowing it, Vega will enter a Sabbat that she will have to survive.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A coming-of-age film that weaponizes Halloween not as backdrop but as permission structure—the premise isn't 'girl goes to party,' it's 'girl consents to obliteration.' That inversion of the final-girl contract is genuinely unsettling, and most festivals would sand down exactly that edge.
Calderón situates this squarely in the lineage of European art-horror and rite-of-passage cinema (echoes of Suspiria's formal dread), with discipline in its tonal control and restraint in what it chooses to show—the surrealism emerges from compositional choice rather than spectacle.
The film's engine is the decision to keep Vega's agency intact even as the Sabbat spirals into the surreal; that refusal to make her a victim but rather a participant transforms a modest 11 minutes into something with real moral weight, and it all pivots on how the sound design isolates her breathing as everything around her fractures.