INTERVIEW: Las Hadas De La Sombra Heads for Hollywood
**This review originally appeared in our July 2026 print issue**
Film still, provided
“While Las Hadas De La Sombra is a horror movie, at its core, it’s about a family’s struggle to keep their children nourished amidst hardship.”
The idea for Las Hadas De La Sombra, the new Spanish language folk horror short film from writer-director Ryan Jenkins, all started with a childhood hatred of squash.
“There was a brief moment in the family where things were a little tight and we ended up eating squash for every single meal at my mother’s house,” Jenkins explained. “It got to the point where it would just make us vomit as soon as it touched our mouths. There was one night where my older brother challenged [our mother] and he had to spend the whole night at the dinner table.”
Jenkins took those experiences and filtered them through a folk horror lens for Las Hadas De La Sombra.
A quick aside for the uninitiated:
Folk horror is a niche genre first explored in late ’60s and early ’70s British cinema that looks at how folklore is used to induce fear. Some early examples were films like 1971’s The Blood on Satan’s Claw or the original The Wicker Man (1973) – I say the original because there’s the abominable, but also highly entertaining remake with Nicolas Cage that has gone from reviled to “so bad it’s good” territory about 17 times since its release in 2006.
More modern examples include Robert Eggers’ The Witch from 2016, which is one of those slowburn films that keeps you unnerved for the first two-thirds before exploding in the final act. Come to think of it, 2011’s Kill List from Ben Wheatley might be my favorite example of this kind of movie. I spent the first hour or so actively wondering what the hell kind of movie I was watching before the absolutely bonkers finale brought the entire mindfuck into sharp focus. Watch that movie! Also, Ari Aster’s Midsommar. Bear suit (IYKYK).
Okay, back to Las Hadas.
The central folklore question in the film is this: How do we get our kids to eat when they don’t want to? For producer Spencer Sherry, a friend’s parents would start a timer for him to finish a certain food that he was resisting. If he didn’t finish before that timer went off, he would get a second scoop of that food and would sit there until the whole plate was cleaned. This is Sherry’s favorite that he’s heard.
Additionally, they were drawing on the idea of the differences between folktales in American culture and those in European and Latin cultures. In American culture, our folktale creatures are always filtered through a positive lens — Santa Claus brings you presents, the Easter Bunny brings you candy, the Tooth Fairy brings you money. It’s all positive reinforcement.
“In every other country and culture, it’s ‘If you don’t behave, you’ll be killed in your sleep,’” Sherry said. “So, [Ryan] wrote an original folktale surrounding this idea of not wasting food.”
“We don’t really have that precedent for negative reinforcement in America, right?” Jenkins added. “In European and Spanish speaking countries, it’s a lot more common to have something like Krampus instead of Santa Claus.”
For lead actress Alma Blue, a native of Venezuela, she remembers these kinds of ghost stories being passed down for kids that were lying or not eating.
“They have different names in different countries,” Blue explained. “It was El Coco in Venezuela. El Coco was going to come and he was going to take the food and also you.”
Thus, for Jenkins, telling this story in Spanish felt more authentic. A long-time student and admirer of the language, Jenkins also felt the language was way cooler than English (#facts).
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Inspired by the films of Guillermo Del Toro, specifically his early Spanish language films like The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth, Jenkins sought to imbue the film with that same level of imagination.
Sherry noted the “practicality of the special effects, the moodiness of it, and the color” as Del Toro touchpoints that made their way into the film.
“[Ryan] did the production design on this film as well,” Sherry detailed. “He wanted there to be a muted yellow color palette to a lot of the eating scenes, probably subconsciously to mimic the ‘squashiness’ of the setting. So, he ran around for months trying to find old National Geographic magazines to stuff in every cluttered inch of the frame.”
Jenkins also built an entire alley from scratch on his property for a pivotal chase scene. Filmed entirely in Rock City Falls, NY, there wasn’t an urban setting in close enough proximity to shoot on location, so Jenkins put his background in construction to good use and built a 12-foot high by 60-foot long alley out of wood, stucco, and brick.
The only problem was that the walls looked far too clean to realistically pass as an alley. The solution? Wheelbarrows full of muddy water and a paint roller were used to give the scummy look they needed.
“Half logistics, but half because it feels way cooler and way more old-school Hollywood to do it this way,” Sherry tells people when they ask why they didn’t just use a real alley. “It feels like, now we’re really making movies.”
There ain’t no CGI, artificial intelligence bullshit on this movie set!
The final piece to bring the film together was the monster. The boogeyman that was there to punish the children for not eating their dinner. Beatrice Sniper was brought on to do the special effects makeup after Sherry and Jenkins were impressed by her work on The Fisherman’s Wife. Sniper played a pivotal role in developing the monster’s appearance, sharing an entire lookbook full of potential ideas with Sherry and Jenkins after they described the general concept.
“It was a decrepit, old creature based on a fairy,” Spencer said of the monster. “It’s got a wing missing and some holes with fungus and moss growing out of them.”
Sniper brought that vision to life and even built a mechanism that allowed the creature’s wing to furl and unfurl like an umbrella.
Executive producer Rob Howard, who is 6’7” and Sherry describes as skinny and lanky, was cast to play the monster. On the day of shooting, he spent six hours in the chair having special effects makeup applied to transform himself into Sniper’s monster.
Film still, provided
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While Las Hadas De La Sombra is a horror movie, at its core it’s about a family’s struggle to keep their children nourished amidst hardship. The family lives on a farm and the eggs from their chickens and yucca that they grow are a part of every meal. Actor Jonathan Florez plays Tio, the brother of Blue’s character, Mama, who hosts the family on his farm. The two young children who grow tired of the eggs and yucca are played by Blue’s own children, Milla and Youri Tomasovic, who had no previous acting experience.
“It was such a blessing,” Blue said about the opportunity to act alongside her children.
Milla’s favorite part of filming was the scene where she gets to throw eggs all around the chicken coop, although, much like her character, she’s sworn off eating yucca after having to eat it so much during production.
Youri fondly remembers the monster: “It wasn’t really scary because we knew [it was pretend]. But it was really cool seeing how realistic it looked.”
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Las Hadas De La Sombra recently made its local premiere at Scene One Cinemas in Wilton Mall on Friday, July 10. Before that, Sherry and Jenkins took the film to the iconic Chinese Theater in Los Angeles for a screening as a part of the Dances With Films festival.
“We love the movie,” Jenkins said. “I think that the cast and the crew love the movie, but it’s always nice to get a little bit of third-party validation. Plus, it happen[ed] to be at such a cool venue.”
Jenkins and Sherry hope the festival will lead to more opportunities to put future projects into production, one of which is a drama that Jenkins wrote specifically for Blue.
To learn more about Las Hadas De La Sombra, check out their IMDb page.
