The Cursed Woods

El Pinar Maldito (The Cursed Woods) is a chilling 7-minute horror short film that reimagines a 19th-century Spanish ghost legend—"El Monte de las Ánimas" by Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer—with a modern twist.

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The Cursed Woods

El Pinar Maldito (The Cursed Woods) is a chilling 7-minute horror short film that reimagines a 19th-century Spanish ghost legend—"El Monte de las Ánimas" by Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer—with a modern twist.

El Pinar Maldito is an exploration of personal memory and regional folklore, processed through the strange, synthetic lens of generative AI. The project was born from the landscapes of my childhood in Sanlúcar de Barrameda, specifically the vast, dark pine forests (pinares) that border the Doñana marshes. There's a specific 'vibe' to that place—a mix of intense natural beauty, isolation, and a latent, almost sacred sense of dread that is deeply Andalusian. My inspiration was to see if I could co-ax a machine into feeling and expressing this very specific, local haunting.

The Process

My workflow is built on transparency and, with much of the process streamed live on my Youtube channel @hilarioabad.

It started with the script, which I wrote manually, "bouncing" ideas off LLMs for speed. Then, moodboarding. For this, I went straight to Midjourney. My custom profile is so trained that it instantly gets my aesthetic. It built the entire world in my head, fast.

The film stars Gema Abad, Cristian de la Tierra, & Diego Villalba. They didn't just provide their voices—they provided their physical likeness. We built the characters from their photos, some pulled straight from their social media. The recording process was pure guerrilla filmmaking. Gema came to my home studio to record her lines. The others? They literally sent me their dialogue as WhatsApp voice notes.

Tools used: Freepik, Pixverse, Leonardo: All-in-one platforms. Image Gen: Intensive work with Seedream 4 & Google Nano Banana. Animation: Driven by their multiple integrated video models (Kling 2.5, Google Veo 3.1, Hailuo 2.3). Upscaling: Every single shot was sharpened using MagnificAI Sublime. Ideogram Character: Face Swaps. SFX: All sound effects generated with Elevenlabs. Music: The entire score was created with Suno. Lip-Sync: Handled by Infinite Talk. Additional animation: Grok Imagine. Photoshop: Used to composite the initial and final frames. DaVinci Resolve: Assembled, edited, and sound-mixed the entire project. Capcut : Had to add a final touch with CapCut. Total fanboy for their filters to get that dirty, 2005-era VHS tape look.

Challenges: The Fight for Authenticity

The greatest challenge was control. Not in the sense of a DOP framing a shot, but in a conceptual, symbolic sense. AI models are trained on global data; they understand "a spooky forest" but struggle with the specific terror of an Andalusian one.

The challenge was to fight against the generic. It involved constantly "course-correcting" the AI, pushing it away from Hollywood horror tropes and back toward the project's more poetic, mystical, and grounded roots. It's a wrestle between my creative intent and the model's algorithmic priors. But somehow, it's also a wonderful collaboration.

Built With

  • adobecreativesuite
  • capcut
  • chatgpt
  • davinciresolve
  • elevenlabs
  • freepik
  • grokimagine
  • hailuo
  • ideogram
  • infinitetalk
  • kling
  • magnificai
  • pixverse
  • suno
  • veo
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