Reviews
‘Satanic Hispanics’ Review – Horror Anthology Delights With Curated Cultural Frights
Satanic Hispanics celebrates Hispanic heritage with a horror anthology that assembles five horror filmmakers from various corners of Latin America. Each applies their cultural background and style, producing an eclectic mix of tales that take wide swings from bone-chilling to delightfully funny. That variation provides a strange yet captivating journey.
A police raid uncovers a grisly crime scene full of dead bodies. They take the sole survivor, a man that refers to himself as “The Traveler” (Efren Ramirez), into custody for answers. The Traveler attempts to explain the bizarre events that led up to his capture to skeptical detectives Gibbons (Sonya Eddy) and Arden (Greg Grunberg). He entertains them with four tales of supernatural encounters, hoping to persuade them to let him go.
Director Mike Mendez (Big Ass Spider!, The Convent) helms the Traveler-centric wraparound. Ramirez serves as the perfect storyteller to connect each segment; his Traveler feels lived in and difficult to surprise, though he tends to surprise himself between stories. The wraparound builds to a showstopper finale that makes you wish the Traveler got his own action-horror feature.
Argentinian filmmaker Demián Rugna previously unsettled horror audiences with Terrified and kicks off the segments with the equally spooky chapter “Tambien Lo Vi.” His haunted house tactics once again demonstrate an uncanny knack for scare crafting as a Rubik’s Cube expert concocts a bizarre formula with his flashlights that creates a portal for terrifying visitors. Rugna sets the bar high right out of the gate with this suspenseful nightmare fuel.
The Blair Witch Project‘s Cuban-born director Eduardo Sánchez gives audiences a reprieve from the scares with the humorous “El Vampiro.” This segment goes for slapstick charm as an ancient vampire uses Halloween as his bloodsucking playground. That is until his nagging wife reminds him that it’s daylight savings.
Gigi Saul Guerrero introduces Mexican folklore in the grim fairy tale “Nahuales,” centered around shapeshifting Mesoamerican mythology. Guerrero continues her streak of blood-drenched horror that wholly embraces cultural specificity in ghoulishly fresh ways. Keeping the massive tonal swings going, Alejandro Brugués’ “The Hammer of Zanzibar” channels Sam Raimi. This chapter goes full splatstick with an almighty phallic weapon, an infectious physical performance by Jonah Ray Rodrigues, and an earworm theme song created by Rodrigues.
The broad theme means that it’s much harder for this anthology to tie these drastically different segments together in a unified manner, at least in terms of narrative. The way these stories are arranged as it swings like a pendulum between scary and funny can also create a bit of whiplash. How and why the Traveler chooses these specific tales to tell doesn’t neatly fit into his overarching story. Yet, there’s a polished visual cohesiveness to the anthology that impresses. Every single piece of the whole holds strong on its own; there’s not a weak link among them. It’s consistent. More importantly, every story is fun in surprising ways.
Satanic Hispanics make for a solid anthology that entertains and delights. That broad approach, opening its curation to all of Latin America and its horror history, makes it trickier to unify. But it also leaves so much room left to explore. There are still centuries and many countries’ worth of horror stories that demand to be told, leaving the door wide open for future installments. I’d love to see more if they can keep up this consistency.
Satanic Hispanics made its world premiere at Fantastic Fest. Release date TBA.
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Movies
‘Recluse’ Review – Harrowing Haunted House Horror With Lots Of Skeletons In Its Closet [Tribeca 2026]
A haunted house story is tense, terrifying storytelling when it’s properly executed. There’s been a growing tendency in horror to blend together harrowing haunted house stories with traumatic homecomings. A family member’s illness or death triggers a return to something dark that was intentionally left behind. Recluse hits all the tropes that one expects to find in this type of horror film, yet it manages to push this story in a daring, disturbing new direction that uses sound as a superpower.
It’s a unique lens to experience a familiar story about family secrets, generational trauma, unresolved grief, and the importance of not just legacy, but preservation. It’s a hell of a directorial debut from Henry Chaisson that’s guaranteed to get under the audience’s skin as they’re dragged through this painful, toxic tale.
Recluse is a gothic haunted house story where an isolated audio engineer, Joan (Sasha Frolova), returns to her family’s estate to check in on her father after he suffers a terrible accident. Joan suddenly discovers something much more sinister that paints her family’s tragedies in a very different light. Chaisson’s debut functions as a fascinating companion piece to this year’s undertone, which does a lot of the same things.
These two films make for a fascinating case of parallel thinking that tackles comparable subject matter through a similar lens, albeit in a bigger, less claustrophobic story in Recluse’s case. In fact, it’s the perfect horror film for anyone who was let down by undertone and didn’t feel like it brought enough to the table. It’s a considerably more conventional horror film, but this isn’t meant to denigrate its high quality. Recluse may hit some familiar notes, but it’s a scary, well-crafted haunted house horror story that goes for the jugular.
A gripping mystery that involves the tragic, unresolved circumstances that surround Joan’s mother teases a chilling connection to the recent horrors that have afflicted her father. Joan desperately tries to put these pieces together and give her family some sense of grander peace before she’s pulled under and becomes another victim of this festering curse that’s systematically worked its way through the Wyatt family. By doing so, Recluse digs into some deeper commentary on collective trauma, a very literal look at the “sins of the father” adage, and how one selfish decision can ripple through generations and fracture off into different dilemmas. By the end, Recluse has brilliantly flipped the powerful concept of legacy on its head by illustrating the horrors and sense of entitlement that can be born out of this idea.
A legacy is just another name for a curse under the right context.
”Listen” is a simple but powerful command from Joan’s father that she briefly obsesses over. In a way, it becomes Recluse’s grander mission statement, whether it’s in response to Joan listening to the people in her life, the signals that her body and mind are telling her, or the world’s greater whims. It’s important to reconnect with these grounding pillars, especially when it feels like control is slipping away.
Recluse excels with how audio and soundscapes can create entire universes that are full of rich details that transport individuals to these environments. There’s also a level of objectivity when it comes to audio recordings and the evergreen permanence that they’re able to provide. Joan’s career as an audio engineer makes sense for someone who wants to cling to hard evidence and proof of existence. It provides great insight into Joan without ever getting lost in contrived exposition.
Joan’s entire life is built around audio engineering, and so it makes sense that Recluse features excellent sound design that really goes above and beyond with its production elements. All of the sound design is expertly handled and turns the film into something special. These auditory elements intuitively keep the audience on edge so that they’re more susceptible to the actual scares that eventually strike. The smallest sound effect gets turned into a crushing, cacophonous assault. It’s a really effective way to build terror. Writer/Director Chaisson also handles the film’s music, which achieves a sublime, unnerving dissonance that further heightens the free-floating anxiety.
The story at the center of Recluse is slightly generic in some respects, but the film’s visual language and tone make it feel distinctly memorable. It also doesn’t hurt that the home that Joan returns to is basically an eerie art studio that’s full of contorted paintings. Recluse never struggles to generate mounting dread and terror that pump through every scene. Powerful, thoughtful cinematography consistently reinforces the film’s themes. Joan is constantly reflected in different surfaces or viewed through mirrors. She’s also often confined to tight, constricting framing that all speaks to her refracted identity during this moment of loss and her attempts to regain agency and control by making sense of something that’s seemingly unexplainable.
Recluse is full of truly disturbing visuals that make it seem like Joan is lost in a dream that turns out to be an extended nightmare. It’s a surreal journey reminiscent of invasive psychological horror like Silent Hill, with a touch of Sinister and Hereditary thrown in for good measure. There are so many individual frames that could endlessly fuel urban legends and creepypastas.
It does a great job with how it presents Joan’s fragile state of mind, where chilling flashes of the past sneak up on her and unresolved trauma manifests into unsettling imagery. There are endless shots that are obscured in darkness, or shadow is creeping in from the corners of frames like a suffocating force of nature. It’s very rare that a scene is fully lit. It leads to a very lonely, isolating atmosphere that’s easy to get lost in.
Chaisson’s debut stands out from the many other high-minded haunted house horror films without succumbing to the same pretensions that often drag down these stories. It’s a grief-stricken character study that’s full of upsetting visuals that scratch at something visceral and raw. The horror elements connect, and the answers to its grander mystery provide an appropriate and believable sense of closure. Those who are looking for an atmospheric horror film that isn’t afraid to be different while still channeling something real will appreciate Recluse.
Recluse made its world premiere at Tribeca; release info TBD.
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