Galicia has always been a borderland. A place where the fog blurs the limits between the real and the imagined. Perhaps that is why fantastic cinema in Galicia is not a passing trend, but a natural consequence of our DNA. What happens when a land of meigas (witches) picks up a camera or it serves as a set for nightmares?
Today, we review the evolution of a genre that journeys from real-life curses to the war between teddy bears and unicorns, finding its spiritual home in Vilagarcía de Arousa.
THE PIONEERS AND THE BLACK LEGENDS
It all begins with Amando de Ossorio. This visionary from A Coruña created his own mythology with his “Blind Templars” in Tombs of the Blind Dead (La noche del terror ciego, 1971) and explored magical exoticism in Night of the Sorcerers (La noche de los brujos, 1974), putting Galicia on the world map of horror.
In 1964, Julio Coll filmed Fuego in Galicia, a revenge thriller with unsettling atmospheres that foreshadowed the potential of our landscapes for suspense. But if we’re talking about true “Folk Horror,” the cornerstone arrived in 1970 with Pedro Olea’s El Bosque del Lobo (The Wolf’s Forest). Raw, realistic, and atmospheric, this masterpiece transformed the real-life legend of Manuel Blanco Romasanta into high-tension cinema, laying the foundation for an obsession—lycanthropy—that Galician cinema would revisit decades later.
But if there is one film that defines our mysterious aura, it is The Bell of Hell (La campana del infierno, 1973). Shot in Noia, this cult jewel carries its own black legend: its director, Claudio Guerín, died tragically falling from the church bell tower on the very last day of shooting. Proof that here, sometimes, terror transcends the screen.
FROM THE MASSACRE TO INNSMOUTH: THE TRANSITION YEARS
Before the current boom, there was a pivotal year: 1989, ground zero for the modern Galician feature film. At that foundational moment, Urxa by Carlos Piñeiro and Alfredo García Pinal shone brightly. This pioneering work dove unapologetically into rural fantasy and witchcraft, demonstrating that our own mythology could sustain a cinema with a distinct identity.
Shortly after, in the 90s, a rowdy explosion arrived with La matanza caníbal de los garrulos lisérgicos (1993) by Toñito Blanco and Ricardo Llovo. With chainsaws and human empanadas, they defined Galician rural gore.
With the turn of the millennium, Galicia became a film set for international and psychological horror. In 2001, the Fantastic Factory brought H.P. Lovecraft to the Rías Baixas with Dagon: La secta del mar, turning Combarro into an unsettling village of sea monster worshippers. A year later, fear moved to the stones of Santiago de Compostela with Trece campanadas (2002), a psychological thriller where a young Luis Tosar faced urban legends and the passage of time.
The myth of Romasanta reclaimed its throne with the new millennium. In 2004, Paco Plaza (winner of the Master of Fantasy Award at Curtas 2025) directed Romasanta, the Hunt for the Beast, an ambitious Fantastic Factory production that gave our darkest legend an international visual style and a gothic-romantic tone, starring Elsa Pataky and Julian Sands.
Surrealism also had its place. In 2011, Os Crebinsky arrived as an absurd fable about two brothers and a cow in a lighthouse. That same year, the genre demonstrated its versatility by embracing horror comedy with Lobos de Arga by Juan Martínez Moreno. A hilarious homage to classic monster movies, it transformed a Galician village (and its lycanthropic curse) into the perfect setting to laugh at fear, cementing the werewolf as the quintessential “Galician” monster, just a year before the Spanish werewolf Paul Naschy appeared in the stop-motion film O Apóstolo (2012), which proved that we could narrate the gothic terror of the Santa Compaña with pioneering techniques.
THE ANIMATED NIGHTMARES OF ALBERTO VÁZQUEZ
The genre found a new international peak with the animation of Alberto Vázquez. His aesthetic universe, equal parts tender and macabre, began with the shorts Birdboy (2011) and Unicorn Blood (2013), culminating in the Goya Award for Birdboy: The Forgotten Children (Psiconautas, 2015).
His exploration of darkness continued with Decorado (2016), Homeless Home (2020), and the war-torn Unicorn Wars (2022). His universe reached full maturity in 2025 with the premiere of the feature film Decorado, cementing him as a world master of adult animation.
THE GOLDEN AGE (2017-PRESENT): FROM FOLK HORROR TO THE FUTURE
In the last decade, we have lived through a creative explosion. The path was opened by the visual discomfort of Dhogs (2017) by Andrés Goteira and the cult singularity of Las Brujas de E’lente (2018) by Simón Vázquez.
From 2020 onwards, the boundary between the living and the dead became the central theme. Lois Patiño hypnotized us with Red Moon Tide (Lúa vermella, 2020), and Alfonso Zarauza explored rural loneliness in Malencolía (2021).
Religious and supernatural horror exploded in 2022 with two opposing proposals: on one hand, The Open Body (O corpo aberto) by Ángeles Huerta, an auteur Folk Horror about possessions on the dry border; on the other, the commercial horror of 13 Exorcisms, filmed in Ourense and inspired by real cases, demonstrating the Galician industry’s capacity for mainstream hits.
While The Beasts (As bestas, 2022) gave us realistic terror and Jacinto (2021) delivered slasher comedy, 2024 brought the existential mystery of As Tres Outras Vidas de María Santiso.
And what does the immediate future hold? The horizon is loaded. All eyes are on the upcoming premiere of Andrés Goteira’s Monstro, which promises to return us to the most primitive essence of fear. But it won’t come alone: we are also anxiously awaiting Los que vienen, the opera prima of Víctor Català. Although filmed in Tenerife, this movie will take us to rural Galicia in 1976, where a family dinner is interrupted by the unsettling calls of a neighbor who claims to be stalked by strangers hidden in the night, promising a new dose of high rural tension.
All this history, from Ossorio’s Templars to the Crebinsky family and their cows, needs a place to be told. Since 1973, that place is Curtas Festival do Imaxinario in Vilagarcía de Arousa.
Curtas is the thread that connects the pioneers with the new talents. The space where comics, literature, and cinema celebrate that, in Galicia, reality is just an option.
The history of the Galician fantastic continues to be written every year. Discover the new voices of horror and fantasy in the next edition. Save the dates: from October 23 to November 1, 2026, in Vilagarcía de Arousa. We are waiting for you!