Lisbon’s horror festival celebrates European experimentation and Portugal’s emerging genre filmmakers.
LISBON, PORTUGAL
MOTELX concluded its 20th edition by awarding its principal European prizes to two Nordic productions. Norwegian director Fredrik S. Hana’s Mancave received the Méliès d’Argent for best European short film, while Danish filmmaker Kasper Kalle’s No Rest for the Wicked won the feature-film category. Both productions will now compete for the Méliès d’Or at the Sitges Film Festival.
Set in the Faroe Islands during the 19th century, No Rest for the Wicked combines an imposing natural landscape with themes of desire, religious authority, repression, love and death. The jury praised the film for weaving those elements together with unusual elegance. Its victory, alongside that of Mancave, placed Nordic cinema at the center of an anniversary edition designed to reflect the geographic and stylistic expansion of contemporary horror.
Portugal’s leading national award went to A Hora do Chico!, directed by João Severo and Rafael Sá Carneiro. The film received €5,000, the country’s largest cash prize for a horror short, after impressing the jury with its ambitious reinterpretation of the Estado Novo dictatorship through an unsettling alternative reality. Consumido, created by Carrozo, earned a special mention for its humor, visual precision and economical reversal of predator and prey.
Other winners included Miguel Monteiro Rico’s Hóspede, recognized as the best Portuguese horror screenplay. Lexi, a Spanish production directed by Portuguese filmmaker Bruno Simões, prevailed in the family-oriented Big Bad Wolf section, while Argentine filmmaker Cris Tapia Marchiori’s Gunman received the audience award.
The festival also honored Portuguese-Swedish director Solveig Nordlund with the Noémia Delgado Award, recognizing women whose work has contributed to horror cinema. Producer Julie Corman participated in a tribute marking the centenary of her late husband, Roger Corman, revisiting the career of the influential filmmaker who helped redefine independent genre production.
Across its two decades, MOTELX has developed a dual identity: an international showcase for unconventional horror and a platform for Portuguese creators working outside the country’s dominant cinematic traditions. This year’s winners demonstrate how the genre can confront political memory, repression and social anxiety without surrendering imagination to explanation.
Horror reveals what ordinary stories prefer to leave unseen.