Hotel Macabro: Short Film Selection 2025

Horror cinema continues to evolve alongside the reflections and chilling predictions its creators make about our destiny as humanity. For the International, Mexican, and Animated short film selection at the 24th edition of Macabro, we delve into dystopian visions that have been developing for a couple of years now. From a world inhabited by android animals that no longer answer to humans in Bye Bear, a law that hunts you down to the death in Judgement of the Dead, or the drama of a mother searching for answers about her missing daughter in Impronta, the outlook of disillusionment is enormous.

But it's not all a disheartening present or a hopeless future. There's nothing like baring our own bloody, Pearl-style grin with the story of a wrestler in a noir world in Arena Sangrienta: Nuevo Testamento, the complicity between two women who reunite in their golden years to help each other against their enemies, the romance between a man and his girlfriend—a werewolf—in Howl If You Love Me by John R. Dilworth (yes, the creator of Courage the Cowardly Dog), a taxi driver pulled from the flames of the capital's hell in El vocho del averno, or the fantasy of a shy Japanese man who, with the help of his family, gains the gift of courage by stealing it from Danny Trejo himself in Magical Meat. In the end, there is also hope: Brute, the beautiful story of a mother desperate to save her terminally ill daughter, ventures into a forest to find a land that miraculously, heals and cures. A fitting close to this eclectic range of stories that show why horror, science fiction, and fantasy are the perfect escape for every storyteller.

From August 19 to 31 at venues and via NuestroCine.mx (abre en nueva pestaña)