Subb Niggurath
2013 · 18m · España
Directed by Roberto Julio Álamo
Tones: dark, melancholic, surreal
In 1948 Bolton, Massachusetts, WWII veteran Herbert E. Dike writes his memoirs on the edge of madness, recalling the sinister events he and his sergeant lived through during the Allied campaign in France.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A Lovecraft title grafted onto a WWII fever dream—most scouts would run screaming from the collision, but Álamo doesn't flinch, letting cosmic horror and soldier's memoir toxins bleed into each other until you can't tell which is corroding which. That's the kind of perverse genre-mashup that shouldn't work and absolutely does.
The film situates itself in a deliberate lineage of psychological horror and war literature, using fragmented memoir as formal architecture; the 18-minute runtime allows for a classical descent into madness that recalls both Poe and the post-war literary tradition without genuflecting to either.
The decision to let unreliable narration collapse the boundary between Herbert's WWII trauma and Lovecraftian dread—rather than keeping them separate—is the hinge that makes the whole thing work on a shoestring; it's economical storytelling that treats ambiguity as a technical strength, not a budget limitation.