la leyenda del sombrerón

Folk horror · 2021

I made this short about Guatemala because I was tired of the same stories getting told. Everyone knows the headlines about gangs, drugs and human rights. That stuff is real, but it's not the Guatemala I grew up in.

I grew up on my grandma's stories, told late at night after everyone else had gone to bed. Folklore that felt magical and eerie, and sometimes genuinely scary. La Leyenda del Sombrerón was one of them, and I wanted to turn it into a dark fairy tale.

Susana is an orphan. She wakes from a nightmare and slips into a world where she can't tell what's real. El Sombrerón might be hunting her, or she might be imagining him. People warn her and she sees things, but she doesn't know who to trust. I never spell out where the nightmare starts or stops. My grandmother never did either, and that's why her stories stuck with me.

"Dream and reality merge into an exitless maze." -Indie Shorts Mag