1 Introduction

Trinta lumes (Thirty Souls) is an 80-minute film by Galician filmmaker Diana Toucedo, released in 2018. Classified by the director as a “feature documentary”, the film exhibits elements of folk horror through its subject matter, setting, and narrative structure. It follows a teenager investigating the mysteries of the afterlife in an isolated region of the Galician mountains, where local beliefs about death remain deeply rooted. Trinta lumes draws on Galician folklore to reinterpret death, a phenomenon widely feared in Western civilization. By situating Toucedo’s film within the broader contexts of Spanish minor cinema and the folk horror genre, this study examines a larger trend of translating oral folklore into cinematic imagery as a means of addressing contemporary collective anxieties through the wisdom of traditional narratives.

The region of Spanish Galicia is particularly rich in beliefs about the afterlife due to a combination of historical and environmental factors. For centuries, it was the poorest part of the Iberian Peninsula, plagued by hunger, disease, and social conflicts, all of which contributed to a high mortality rate. The Galician coast, known as Costa da Morte (“Coast of Death”), is one of the most perilous areas of the Atlantic Ocean, notorious for shipwrecks. Over the years, the sea has washed ashore the bodies of drowned sailors alongside fragments of sunken ships and the goods they once carried.

Additionally, since the nineteenth century, Galicia has been the Spanish region most affected by emigration. Although emigration did not always mean physical death, it often resulted in a form of social or civil death, particularly for those left behind. Rosalía de Castro, a symbolic figure in the nineteenth-century revival of Galician literature, captured this loss through the concept of viúdas dos vivos (“widows of the living”) – a term referring to women whose husbands emigrated to the Americas, never to be heard from again (1982 [1880], 208).

Numerous films explore the deep connection between Galician culture and death, and their directors are not exclusively Galician. Notable examples include Costa da Morte (Coast of Death, 2013) and Lúa vermella (Red Moon Tide, 2020) by Lois Patiño, O corpo aberto (The Open Body, 2022) by Ángeles Huerta, and Sica (2023) by Carla Subirana. Even Laberinto del fauno (Pan’s Labyrinth, 2006) by Guillermo del Toro, set in the Galician mountains, engages with this theme – though, unlike the other films, it is not directly inspired by local folklore.

Folk horror is a relatively new and still evolving concept, with flexible criteria that have yet to be fully defined. Popularized in the 2010s, it can sometimes be difficult to distinguish from other horror subgenres, such as Gothic horror (for example, Huerta’s O corpo aberto is classified as both) or “monster horror”. The term folk horror was originally used to describe a series of British films from the 1960s and 1970s in which landscape and folklore played a dominant role in provoking fear (Buckley 2019, 23).

Since the 2010s, folk horror has experienced a revival beyond the UK, with films such as The VVitch (Robert Eggers, 2015), Midsommar (Ari Aster, 2019), The Other Lamb (Małgorzata Szumowska, 2019), Dýrið (Lamb, Valdimar Jóhannsson, 2021), and Des Teufels Bad (The Devil’s Bath, Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, 2024). In the Spanish context, folk horror has gained particular prominence in the Basque Country, with films such as Errementari (The Blacksmith and the Devil, 2017) and the short film Dar-Dar (2010) by Paul Urkijo, Akelarre (Coven, 2020) by Pablo Agüero, Zerua hautsi zen gaua (2020) by Maria Fontaner, and El guardián invisible (The Invisible Guardian, 2017) by Fernando González Molina. Although the latter leans more toward the thriller genre than horror, it is still inspired by Basque mythology.

Andrés Calvo (2021, 82), while acknowledging that “providing a taxonomy of folk horror is a near-impossible task”, identifies several recurring tropes. According to him, folk horror is predominantly set outdoors, often during the day, and in communal settings. These communities, along with the landscapes they inhabit, tend to be isolated, resistant to progress, and largely untouched by Western civilization.

Trinta lumes is predominantly shot in daylight and in communal spaces where neighbors gather, such as the cemetery, church, kitchen, yard, and the mountains during collective hunting. Although some scenes take place indoors, the film clearly favors outdoor settings. Moreover, the action unfolds in O Courel, one of the most depopulated regions of Spain, where the village is depicted as a traditional environment, with stone houses and rudimentary infrastructure. Thus, Trinta lumes appears to align closely with Calvo’s characterization.

However, Trinta lumes is not fully fictionalized. As the director herself admits, the film was initially conceived as a pure documentary. Yet, after spending over four years working on the project and immersing herself in the local community, Toucedo allowed popular stories to influence her filmmaking process (Toucedo and Martínez 2017). In this sense, Trinta lumes can also be associated with the subgenre of paradocumentary horror (also known as horror vérité or mockumentary horror), exemplified by films such as The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, 1999) and the Paranormal Activity series (Oren Peli, 2007, and subsequent installments).

In Toucedo’s film, however, fiction gradually takes precedence over documentary elements – not as a staged reality that mimics the documentary form, but rather as an organic process in which the boundaries between the real and the imagined blur. Nevertheless, it still operates within what Żakieta (2013, 46) describes as the ambiguity of categorization between the factual and fictional order, a defining feature of this subgenre.

As Barsam and Monahan argue (2019, 95), “the horror genre was born out of a cultural need to confront and vicariously conquer something frightening that we do not fully comprehend” – namely, death and insanity. Trinta lumes addresses both of these fears. Its central theme is the afterlife and the thin boundary between those who are alive and those who have already left this world. While insanity is not explicitly discussed, the film subtly suggests that the boundary between reason and madness is just as fragile. Alba, the main character, is indirectly associated with both the witch and the madwoman – figures deeply embedded in Galician popular culture.

In cinema, these fears must be given tangible form, which can manifest in various figures – the ghost, the vampire, the zombie, the werewolf, the witch, or the monster – embodiments of the other. As Barsam and Monahan note, “the only thing scarier than being killed or consumed by the other is actually becoming the other” (2019, 95). This is precisely what happens to Alba, who mysteriously disappears, seemingly absorbed into another dimension.

Barsam and Monahan further claim (2019, 96) that horror cinema is deeply tied to both a strong tradition of folklore and the collective trauma of historical events – factors that serve as sources of inspiration while also shaping the film’s intended audience, as evidenced by the well-established German horror tradition. In this regard, Galicia provides a fitting cultural and historical backdrop for a story about death, and Toucedo skillfully draws upon both elements in Trinta lumes.

2 Death: A Place of Transition

Contemporary societies within the Western cultural sphere exist in a paradox. On the one hand, these cultures are future-oriented; on the other, the cult of individualism leads to a denial of mortality and the erasure of death from public space. As Knox (2006, 234) writes: “The annihilation of self is viewed by the late modern subject both as threatening and somehow paradoxical, and death itself becomes somehow idiopathic.”

How does cinema respond to this socially conditioned fear? Filmmakers generally adopt two strategies in representing death: domestication or annihilation. The first approach can be described as ars moriendi and applies to both real and fictional narratives depicting people suffering from terminal illnesses. Knox (2006, 234) defines this type of narrative as “social scripts for dying.” The annihilation of death, on the other hand, is simply a fantasy of immortality, which manifests in various forms. Sometimes it takes the shape of ghosts haunting the living or visions of a shared afterlife. At other times, immortality is imagined as a biotechnological replica – a clone, a robot, etc. In some cases, it involves only a fragment of a being, such as an emanation from a transplanted organ.

Toucedo’s point of departure is different, which allows her to adopt an alternative strategy in representing death. Trinta lumes is inspired by traditional Galician beliefs about death, which remain deeply rooted and widely known, especially in rural areas (Toucedo and Martínez 2018). Noia Campos (2019, 59) writes about the solidarity between the living and the dead and the deep-seated belief in the possibility of contact between both worlds. In the collective imagination of the Galician people, these two elements became a social, cultural, and religious experience, passed down unchanged from generation to generation until the mid-twentieth century. Chao Rego (1983, 30–31) describes social life in rural Galicia as centered on the parish, while Lisón Tolosana (2004a, 117) notes that the “parish of the dead” was symbolically just as real as that of the living. Toucedo (Toucedo and Martínez 2018) herself remarked that in O Courel, where Trinta lumes was filmed, death was not the end but rather a place of transition.

The roots of these beliefs date back to pre-Christian times. The Celts believed that after death, one lived in a world just as real as that of the living, with the only difference being that the former was more pleasant. With the arrival of Christianity, the Celtic world of the dead was replaced by the concepts of heaven and hell, and later purgatory. It is from this last realm that wandering souls are believed to emerge. In the world of the living, these souls most often seek redemption, requesting, for instance, that a mass be said for them or that an injustice they committed be righted. In some cases, they also assist their families, particularly when their death has significantly disrupted the natural order – for instance, when a mother of young children dies prematurely.

Death in Trinta lumes is presented as omnipresent, multifaceted, and normalized – yet still unsettling. The film is disturbing from its very first long shot: a nighttime view of the mountains, dotted with small lights, as voices call out “Alba!” Alba is a Galician female name, but it also means “dawn” and is associated with meanings such as “white” and “innocent”. The scene evokes one of the most terrifying beliefs in Galician culture regarding contact with the afterlife: the Santa Compaña (Holy Company), a procession of souls in torment.

At midnight, the dead rise from their graves and walk in a line, carrying candles, behind a living man who bears a cross. The house where they stop will soon be visited by death. Typically, only the living leader of the Company is visible. The souls remain unseen by most people, though their presence is suggested by the lights floating through the air as the procession moves through the forests or villages. The threat posed by the Company lies in the possibility that the guide will pass the cross to another living person, thereby forcing that person to take over as leader – trapped in the role until they, too, manage to pass the burden on. Taking the cross signifies entrapment in another dimension – a common motif in mythologies related to the afterlife: if you take something that belongs to the other world, you cannot return. In addition to the danger of the cross, those who encounter the Santa Compaña may be given a light, a sign that they will soon die. In short, the Holy Company brings not only the risk of being imprisoned in the afterlife but also death itself (Lisón Tolosana 2004a, 122–188; Noia Campos 2019, 67–69).

References to the Holy Company are not uncommon in Galician cinema. O Apóstolo (The Apostle, 2012) by Fernando Cortizo, an adult animated feature film, is perhaps the most well-known example. Its story is also tied to the Camino de Santiago (Way of Saint James) and the legends surrounding it. The phenomenon is represented much as it appears in folktales – as the procession of lost souls imagined by the people themselves. In Lois Patiño’s Lúa vermella (Red Moon Tide, 2020), the Company is linked to Costa da Morte and ocean-related stories. In this case, the viewer is placed within the afterlife itself, though this is not immediately apparent. The film’s protagonists are motionless while the rest of the world – plants, animals, the sea – remains in motion. Only when three witches appear and cover the still figures with white sheets do they finally begin to move, forming the procession. The approach and techniques differ in both films, but the representation of Galician folk belief is equally literal and explicit.

In Trinta lumes, however, the connection to the Holy Company is only suggested – and this is the most important feature of Toucedo’s treatment of folklore. Moreover, the fact that Galicia’s most widespread belief about death appears in the film’s very first shot directs the viewer toward a specific reading: the afterlife and traditional conceptions of it are central themes. Cinematically, these opening shots create genre-based expectations by evoking a horror atmosphere: night, mountains, forest, disembodied voices, agitation, unease. This imagery recalls a different collective imagination about death – that of American pop culture, shaped by Hollywood horror films and Halloween traditions. Both are directly referenced in Trinta lumes, establishing a dialogue between the local and the global, tradition and modernity, the young and the old. Toucedo’s film operates within the tensions between these dimensions, just as it positions its protagonist between the realms of the living and the dead – ultimately questioning whether such a boundary exists at all.

The second sequence of the film is just as defining as the first. Without knowing whether Alba has been found, viewers are presented with a series of long takes showing the monumental landscapes of O Courel, the region where the film was shot. For almost eight minutes, images of mountains, forests, streams, and traditional stone houses follow one another, depicting the passage of time from autumn through winter to spring. The elements are strikingly present, both sonically and visually: violent rains and winds, thick clouds covering the sky and descending into the valleys, snow on the mountain peaks, and a biting cold that – though not visible – is powerfully suggested and almost physically felt through images of a hostile natural world. No human figure appears in this landscape, and the houses seem more like extensions of nature than products of human construction.

A human voice is introduced before any human body appears on screen. It is Alba’s voice, recounting the feeling she had on the night of 2 November: “Durmía intranquila e de súpeto sentinos. Non podía falar, non podía moverme. Non podía emitir ningún son. Só sentía frío.” (“I was sleeping restlessly, and suddenly I felt them. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t make a sound. I only felt cold.”) Given that the opening shots of the film evoke the presence of the Santa Compaña, Alba’s sensations correspond to the crossing over to the other side. Even if the ghosts of the Company cannot be seen, folklore tells us they can still be felt. What happens to Alba is a direct encounter with the dead, and as a consequence, she herself becomes one of them – an implication clearly conveyed through her description of her state. However, the visual layer of the film subverts the expected imagery associated with such an experience. Alba’s terrifying account is accompanied not by horror tropes, but by the soft sound of sheep bells and the image of a sheepfold window through which a number of animals’ eyes quietly observe.

The transition from night, the Santa Compaña, and a horror-movie-like scenario to the natural world is central to Toucedo’s approach to the film’s core subject. It is also what makes Trinta lumes a compelling example of folk horror, even if it does not seem to check all the conventional boxes. As noted earlier, this subgenre typically draws fear from two main sources: a hostile, isolated landscape and supernatural phenomena drawn from folktales. The action often takes place in daylight and within a small, hermetic community that clings to local beliefs. O Courel is one of the most depopulated regions in Galicia, with only a few functioning villages scattered across a vast mountainous terrain. In the area where Trinta lumes was filmed, the only school had just thirty students – the number that gives the film its title. Alba, in her search for answers about death, also explores abandoned houses left behind by emigrants. In these spaces, nature reclaims the human realm, with plants growing through walls and cobwebs covering every corner.

While the younger generation is carving pumpkins at school and watching horror movies for Halloween, older residents speak about traditional local beliefs surrounding death. In one classroom scene, students carve a pumpkin under the teacher’s guidance, who encourages them to “take the brain out” and jokes that since the pumpkin has a big head, it must have a big brain. This scene not only directly references the Halloween tradition, but also subtly alludes to another horror subgenre: the slasher film. This connection is reinforced in a later scene, where a group of girls watches precisely this kind of movie in the dark, as suggested by sound effects and their frightened reactions. These images contrast with the calm presence of a woman sitting on a pile of pumpkins, reflecting on All Souls’ Day as she remembers it from her youth. She wonders how today’s children can be taught to laugh at death – as the school scene seems to do – when her own generation was deeply fearful of any encounter with the dead. As she speaks, she gently caresses a pumpkin, as if stroking a small animal.

The juxtaposition of the humorous classroom scene and the girls’ panic during the slasher film is not contradictory. As Barsam and Monahan (2019, 95–96) argue, horror films enable viewers to confront and demystify their fears in the safe environment of the cinema, without suffering the devastating consequences of a real encounter with the other. Beyond that, contemporary Western cultures have pushed death to the margins, exalting youth and vitality. As Bauman (1996, 17) puts it, our society is ashamed of its own mortality. As a result, death is no longer a lived experience for most people in developed countries. Not only is human death confined to specialized spaces such as hospitals and hospices, but animal death is also increasingly hidden. As Burt (2005, 213) observes, since the nineteenth century, practices involving animal death – such as slaughter and scientific experimentation – have been progressively removed from public view.

In Trinta lumes, the viewer witnesses various forms of death. Beyond Alba’s mysterious fate and the quiet disappearance of neighbors due to emigration, human mortality is approached from multiple perspectives. A young boy is accidentally shot during a hunting trip. His death is not shown on screen but reported via radio – an indirect treatment that contrasts with the visual brutality of the hunting scenes in which a wild boar is first violently attacked by dogs and then meticulously prepared by the hunters. According to the radio, the dead boy was mistaken for a boar – an eerie echo of the slasher genre, though this time the focus is on the animal as the central figure.

In the Catalan film Ovella (Sheep, 2021, Marc Puig Biel, Júlia Marcos Lázaro, Daria Molteni, Sergi Rubio González), a similar technique is used to highlight the (in)parallel between human and animal death. In the film, a man who has been raised as a sheep within a flock is accidentally taken to the slaughterhouse along with the rest of the animals. The sequence is shot entirely from the animal’s perspective, as the protagonist knows no other point of view. He is transported with the flock in a truck, watches the landscape passing through the ventilation holes, experiences the same anxiety during the journey and the same confusion when the doors open, and sees the same intense red color on the floor as he is thrown out of the trailer. Finally, he is recognized as human and saved from the fate reserved for animals.

In both Trinta lumes and Ovella, a human is mistaken for a nonhuman and led toward death (Trinta lumes) or placed in a near-death situation (Ovella). This narrative device serves to expose the “inhumanity” of death inflicted on animals by humans. What appears as abnormal or extreme in slasher films is, in fact, normalized within the everyday, invisible practices of animal killing in Western cultures. Both films suggest that the error lies not in the confusion between human and nonhuman, but in the very foundations of the human/animal dichotomy. Like many other ecocritics, Brian Massumi challenges the idea of humanity as radically distinct from all other forms of life, whether organic or inorganic. He writes (2014, 93), with a touch of irony:

Where typological thinking falls apart? That would be […] from the beginning, in the end, and most especially in the middle (which it fancies to exclude). Don’t be mistaken into thinking that the more-than-human is outside, surrounding the human, in the environment. The more-than-human is also in the very makeup of the human.

In Trinta lumes, the question is not only about a boy mistaken for a boar, but about the instability of the entire environment – where it becomes impossible to determine what lies at the center and where the boundaries fall between categories artificially constructed as separate. Sheep gaze directly at the camera as Alba speaks of her supposed death; houses seem to blend into the mountains or are slowly overtaken by nature; the elements – wind, rain, cold – dominate the audiovisual texture of the film. All these features emphasize the interconnectedness of every part of the system.

Within this landscape, death is not an ending but a transition from one state of being to another. In one scene, a mountain is shown; then, houses built from its extracted materials; then, a factory producing stone tiles. The sequence continues with a shot of the factory’s waste rock dump and ultimately returns to the mountain – now visibly scarred and damaged. In another scene, a chicken is decapitated, and broth is made from its body. The deaths of humans, animals, and other beings – organic or not – were once everyday experiences in rural communities, and they still are in places like O Courel. Traditional Galician beliefs, therefore, had to provide a way of dealing with actual, physical death – and they did so by integrating the afterlife into life itself.

3 Tolas, Meigas, and Mouras: Creatures of the In-Between

As Lisón Tolosana (2004a, 117) described it, Alba similarly says in voice-over: “Aldeas cheas de mortos convivindo cos vivos” (“Villages full of the dead who coexist with the living”), some of the former “Algúns seguen nas súas casas” (“still living in their houses”) and others who “volven e vixian” (“return and watch”). However, as an audiovisual medium, film faces a fundamental challenge in depicting (im)mortality. If death is not the end but merely the loss of a physical body, how can the void it leaves behind be visually represented? In other words, how can invisibility be made visible? According to Knox (2006, 241), contemporary Western cinema exhibits a strong attachment to the corporeal – to flesh-and-blood bodies – even in their posthumous emanations. Entities from “the other world” tend to resemble their living selves at the moment of death, at a significant point in their past, or simply at the peak of their lives. The same applies to representations of the afterlife, which is often inhabited by bodily replicas of earthly beings. Yet these are all escapist techniques aimed at, in effect, canceling death. Death is no longer even a transition to another form of existence, but rather an extension of that existence.

In Trinta lumes, as in Galician folklore, knowledge about the afterlife is transmitted through an intermediary. Ordinary people could not see the dead; only individuals with a special sensitivity could perceive them. In Toucedo’s film, it is Alba who speaks to the viewers about the other “parish.” Thus, the invisibility of ghosts is addressed through orality – just as it was in traditional Galician culture. People did not see the dead, but they were told about them, and still, they were absolutely convinced of their existence. This conviction was often reinforced by interpreting certain phenomena as evidence of the overlapping worlds of the living and the dead. The same is true in Trinta lumes, where Alba’s words are supported by subtle visual signs that never represent ghostly figures directly, but instead allude to popular beliefs through symbols such as clothes blowing in the wind, mirrors, old photographs, and more. However, the most significant representation of souls in the world of the living in Toucedo’s film is light.

The Galician title of the film, Trinta lumes (literally “thirty lights”), refers to a rich and complex concept in local popular culture. Lume can mean either “light” or “fire” and is closely associated with the center of family life in each home: the lareira. In traditional houses, the lareira was a flat stone placed low to the ground, used for cooking. But it was much more than just a place to prepare meals. Chao Rego (1988, 34) describes it as a “lugar privilexiado da palabra” (“privileged place of the word”), because it was there that household members – often joined by neighbors – would sit and tell stories. It was also a place of spiritual significance: the lareira was believed to be where the souls of ancestors could return and make contact with the living. Toucedo herself explains in an interview (Toucedo and Martínez 2018) that the Galician title refers to this concept, suggesting that a home where the light is still present is an inhabited one. Many houses, abandoned due to emigration, are now empty and devoid of both physical and metaphorical life. In the film, souls are represented by small lights rising from empty houses and caves, while in inhabited homes, people gather around stoves and fireplaces, telling folktales and stories from the past. It is also through the fire that Alba speaks to her friend after she has disappeared.

The lareira also evokes a traditional form of timekeeping rooted in the rhythm of nature. The rural year was divided into two distinct halves: one marked by intense agricultural labor, and the other, when the land rested – roughly between October and April, which served as transitional months. Winter tasks were typically carried out indoors and were less physically demanding than summer work. This quieter season was characterized by small neighborhood gatherings, often prompted by winter-specific chores such as spinning linen thread, and became an opportunity to share stories around the lareira. Symbolically, the winter cycle began with All Saints’ Day and magosto, a communal celebration centered on fire and roasted chestnuts. Toucedo’s Trinta lumes begins and ends precisely at this point in the calendar, linking the film’s narrative structure to the seasonal rhythms of the traditional peasant year. The slow, lingering shots of the landscape convey the full passage of the seasons, reinforcing a cyclical conception of time that aligns with the agrarian worldview.

Toucedo further challenges the classical linear temporality of cinematic storytelling by connecting this natural cycle to the afterlife. Contact with the dead takes place primarily during lareira time – when families and neighbors gather in autumn and winter – coinciding with Alba’s disappearance on All Saints’ Day. The film opens and closes with the same scene: lights in the night and voices calling “Alba!” Between these two moments, Alba appears at times on screen as a living, fully diegetic protagonist, and at other times as a disembodied voice, seemingly speaking from another dimension – presumably the afterlife. Referring to the dead, she states: “Fóra do tempo, xa non teñen tempo” (“Outside of time – they no longer have time”). Through its disrupted chronology, Trinta lumes symbolically positions itself in a liminal space – between the traditional, cyclical order of rural life and the timelessness of the afterlife.

Alba herself is a liminal character – both cinematographically (she exists simultaneously within the diegetic and non-diegetic space) and culturally. As noted earlier, in Galician tradition, only certain individuals possessed the ability to see and communicate with the dead – precisely what Alba does in the film. In the Galician countryside, there were both real individuals, believed by their communities to have such a gift, and fantastical beings from folktales who occupied that liminal space between the worlds of the living and the dead. Most of these figures capable of crossing into the afterlife were women.

Although Alba is never explicitly defined as one of them, she possesses their attributes and identifies with a broader female community. She repeatedly speaks in the plural feminine form – “we” (nosoutras), “there are lots of us” (somos moitas) – aligning herself with a collective female presence. While many of these feminine figures also appear in other popular cultures, Galicia’s particular sociohistorical context gives them unique significance. The region’s high rate of emigration – primarily among men – contributed to a social structure in which women played a central role. It would be unfounded to describe Galician culture as matriarchal – a thesis proposed by the Xeración Nós^[1] in the early twentieth century and quickly refuted – but it was nevertheless a culture with high levels of female participation, shaped by demographic realities. As a result, Galician folklore was in large part created, transmitted, and populated by women (Murguía 1925, 65; Gala González 1997, 303).

Among the many figures from Galician folklore and rural life – often overlapping as both mythical and real – the most relevant to Trinta lumes are the madwoman, the witch, and the moura. The madwoman (tola in Galician) not only sees what others cannot but is also permitted to speak truths others dare not voice. Because she is not expected to say anything coherent or socially acceptable, her revelations often go unnoticed – except by those who listen carefully. In Galician literature under Franco’s dictatorship, the figure of the madwoman became a powerful trope for truth-telling. The atrocities committed by the regime were so extreme, they could only be spoken through voices deemed irrational.

In Trinta lumes, the figure of the madwoman – though not evoked literally – serves not to critique a political regime, but rather to question the capitalist logic that governs modern relationships to life and nature. The film’s slow rhythm, rooted in natural cycles and traditional ways of living, stands in stark contrast to the accelerated pace of modern life and its relentless drive for productivity and profit. The community’s deep connection to the environment, the interdependence between humans and nonhumans, and the blurring of boundaries between them all reject the extractivist worldview and the binary opposition between nature and culture. From this perspective, Alba’s reflections on the dead and the afterlife are not at all irrational. On the contrary, the vision of modern society – represented in the film through allusions to Halloween and slasher films – feels absurd and disconnected from lived experience.

The witch (bruxa or meiga in Galician), in its most basic form, is a person capable of casting or lifting an evil spell – known in Galician as mal de ollo (“the evil eye”). However, she is also associated with, or even identified as, a wise woman (sabia) – a healer who could cure illness or assist with childbirth. Their ability to intervene in matters of health and magic was grounded in knowledge of both the natural world (particularly medicinal herbs) and supernatural forces (Jiménez-Esquinas 2013, 62; Lisón Tolosana 2004b, 258). In Trinta lumes, these domains – nature and the supernatural – are not separate but deeply interconnected, even indistinguishable. Alba disappears while attentively listening to chestnut trees, attempting to make contact with the dead, believing that nature serves as a medium through which the dead speak to the living. When she vanishes into thin air, subtle drawings of faces appear on the trees in the valley she entered, suggesting Alba’s full integration into nature as the ultimate afterlife.

A similar idea is explored in Totes les històries (All the Stories), a short film in the Occitan language by Sergi Cameron (2019). An old woman – identified as a witch – is first shown naked in a river, covered in leaves, forest fruits, and flowers. She is asked to cure a child but is ultimately burned at the stake for it. At the same moment that she is dying, a new witch – a young girl – is “born” in the same cold river, lying under a similar natural duvet of leaves and flowers, listening to the voice of the old woman, who passes on her knowledge. In Totes les històries, the witch is not defined as such by any objective traits but only through the opinions of others. Nonetheless, her portrayal in the film clearly draws from the collective imagination. In Akelarre (Basque for “witches’ coven”) by Pablo Agüero (2020), witches are entirely a product of collective fantasy, fueled by the witch-hunt carried out by the Inquisition. A group of ordinary girls, accused of witchcraft, gradually begin to play along – offering the inquisitor a spectacle that meets his expectations and desires.

The figure of the witch is a recurring trope in horror cinema, especially folk horror, as it engages with landscape, folklore, and superstition – bringing both nature and feminine otherness to the forefront. This figure is particularly relevant in the context of minoritized cultures in Spain, where national identities are strongly rooted in rural areas – precisely the spaces where regional languages are spoken and traditional cultural practices remain most vibrant. The examples mentioned above – Totes les històries and Akelarre – connect the witch figure to local histories, contributing to nationalist discourses that emphasize cultural difference from the Spanish majority. Cameron, a Catalan director, situates his story in the Middle Ages, when Catalan and Occitan were still the same language. This choice symbolically separates Catalonia from Spain by highlighting distinct historical and linguistic roots.

Agüero’s Akelarre refers to the historical events in Zugarramurdi, where the largest witch-hunt in Spanish history took place in 1610. The Kingdom of Navarre was the only region in Spain to convert to Calvinism in 1560, under the reign of Jeanne d’Albret. Because evangelization in the vernacular is a central tenet of Protestantism, several sacred texts were translated into the Basque language during this time. While Galician and Catalan had a rich literary tradition in the Middle Ages, the Basque Country had only oral literature. The Protestant impulse from Queen Jeanne was thus a crucial moment in the development of written Euskera. Nevertheless, even years after the kingdom’s reconversion to Catholicism, the region remained under suspicion of heresy. This lingering distrust helps explain how easily the witch-hunt spread and why so many were accused of witchcraft. The site most associated with these magical practices is a cave in Zugarramurdi, where a museum dedicated to the events was later established.

A cave, associated with the akelarre in Basque culture, also appears in Trinta lumes. It is presented as a space where contact with the dead can be made – where subtle faces appear drawn into the rocks, and where small lights symbolizing souls are seen. However, in Galician culture, caves are more commonly linked to another folk figure: the moura. This belief dates back to pre-Roman times, and the term moura is etymologically related to the Celtic mrvos, meaning “dead.” Alonso Romero (1998, 13) describes the mouro and moura as “los antepasados remotos, los desaparecidos hace mucho tiempo cuando aún no había llegado el cristianismo” (“remote ancestors, long disappeared, from a time before Christianity arrived”). Given the traditional Galician understanding of death as “un paso de un estado de existencia a otro, necesario para introducirse en el mundo de los antepasados en el que se seguía viviendo” (“a passage from one state of existence to another, necessary in order to enter the world of the ancestors, where life continued”) (Alonso Romero 1998, 12), mouras (and mouros) are creatures that inhabit an in-between dimension – neither fully alive nor fully gone. In Trinta lumes, the only folktale narrated in its entirety and directly drawn from oral tradition is the one about the moura. It is told around the fire of a stove – a visual and symbolic echo of the lareira – immediately after Alba’s disappearance.

The main character in Trinta lumes is associated with all three figures from Galician folklore – tola, meiga, and moura – without being clearly identified as any one of them. The boundaries between these archetypes are blurred, unified by a shared sensibility toward the surrounding world and an ability to communicate with all kinds of beings. In Alba’s case, two aspects are particularly significant: her cultural embeddedness and her age. She speaks Galician and listens attentively to stories told by other members of the community. As a teenager, she remains open to ideas that adults – especially outsiders – would dismiss as mere products of imagination. But the issue is not only belief in the afterlife; it extends to a broader worldview – one that recognizes the interconnectedness of all elements within the living system.

Toucedo has emphasized in interviews that the central aim of her film is to question conventional ways of seeing and to offer an alternative perspective. She deliberately chose a twelve-year-old protagonist because of the cognitive flexibility of the young mind: “Los adultos tenemos ya el mundo totalmente articulado en nuestras cabezas” (“We adults already have the world fully structured in our minds”) (Toucedo and Martínez 2018). This connects directly with Brian Massumi’s notion of animality, to which children are closer than adults – not in a zoological sense, but in terms of bodily awareness, affective openness, and the potential for creative becoming. Massumi (2014, 73) suggests that children are not yet fully shaped by normopathic structures – that is, the rigid emotional, behavioral, and social codes that define what is considered “normal” in adult life. In this sense, Alba is once again positioned as a liminal figure, located on the threshold between childhood and adulthood, and, by extension, between the animal end of the human–nonhuman continuum and the normopathic pole that defines the adult subject in Massumi’s terms.

4 Conclusion

The classification of Trinta lumes as a horror film may be questioned, as it seemingly lacks the genre’s primary feature: provoking fear. The subject matter is unsettling, and the characters speak of fear, but the ritualistic catharsis that, according to Barsam and Monahan (2019, 96), horror typically offers to its viewers, is not fully present. This is largely due to the singular perspective adopted by the director, which can be described as one of magical realism.

Although the term originates in literature – particularly in the works of Latin American writers of the 1960s – it has also found expression in painting and cinema. Its defining feature is the presentation of “abnormal” or supernatural elements as part of the everyday, unremarkable fabric of life. These phenomena do not disrupt reality but are woven into it. As Mroczkowska Brand (2009, 29) notes, faith is a central component of magical realism. Rooted in communal belief systems, the miraculous (lo maravilloso) becomes real and even mundane. To achieve this, magical realism employs the descriptive depth and sensory richness of classical realism, integrating the irrational into historical and social context. Narratives are typically expansive and polyphonic – sometimes incorporating the voices of the dead – and leave the audience suspended between rational and non-rational interpretations: “pomiędzy przeczuciem innego porządku a obrazem świata bardziej harmonijnego, poszerzonego o różne wymiary” (“between a sense of another order and a vision of the world as more harmonious, expanded to include various dimensions”) (Mroczkowska Brand 2009, 53).

Bordwell and Thompson (2021, 374) observe that it is often the characters’ reactions to abnormal events that define horror’s emotional impact. In folk horror, however, this reaction is more complex. If the “scary” element stems from local belief, it may or may not provoke fear – because it is not experienced as an anomaly. Many folk horror films introduce outsiders into closed traditional communities, enabling the audience to identify with their fear. But this is not a defining trait. Some folk horror, such as Des Teufels Bad, omits the outsider altogether, reinforcing the insider perspective and aligning more fully with local knowledge and cosmology. In such cases, folk horror becomes especially receptive to the poetic logic of magical realism.

More accurately, folk horror should be understood through the context of its production. As Buckley (2019, 23) explains, the subgenre emerged alongside the countercultural movements of the 1960s and reflects a return to ancestral knowledge, renewed interest in folk traditions, astrology, and pagan spirituality. Horror as a genre has always responded to broader social anxieties (Bordwell and Thompson 2021, 377); folk horror addresses them through the lens of collective memory and tradition. Today, those anxieties include not only individual fear of death, but also existential threats on a planetary scale – ecological catastrophe, the rise of political extremism, and the looming fear of global conflict. In this context, folk horror is uniquely positioned to address these overlapping fears, offering a response rooted in ancestral wisdom and collective imagination.

In the case of cinema from minority cultures in Spain, another layer of anxiety emerges: the threat of cultural and linguistic erasure. Because folk horror is grounded in both landscape and folklore, it becomes an ideal medium for expressing the urgency of cultural preservation. This is particularly evident in Trinta lumes, where the impulse to document a vanishing community intersects with the director’s fascination with its mythology – and with the cinematic temptation to transform oral tradition into fiction. Rather than provoke fear, Trinta lumes invites reflection – on death, tradition, and the permeability of worlds. In doing so, it reveals how folk horror, when shaped by magical realism and minority cultures, becomes a vital cinematic language for reimagining collective futures.