Genre Mystery

Soucouyant (2015)

Item: Soucouyant
Rating: 1.5
Author: Ross McLaren

★½ — Soucouyant (2015)

Caribbean folklore has a rich and largely underexplored place in world cinema, and the soucouyant is one of its most distinctive figures. Across the islands of the Eastern Caribbean, particularly in Trinidad and Tobago, St. Lucia and surrounding nations, the soucouyant is a shape-shifting spirit, an old woman by day who sheds her skin at night to roam as a ball of fire, feeding on the blood of sleeping victims. It is the kind of legend that has sustained oral tradition for generations, the sort of material that horror filmmakers would queue up to adapt if it originated in a more commercially prominent culture. That it remains relatively obscure outside the region says more about the economics of global distribution than about the potency of the myth itself.

Soucouyant (2015) is a short film from St. Lucia, running at twelve minutes, produced through Nexus Networks and Iland Boy Films. It is directed by Sean Field, working within what is, by any measure, a modest local production context. St. Lucia is a small island nation with no long-established film industry to speak of, which makes any feature or short originating there something of a curiosity worth paying attention to, even if only to take stock of what independent Caribbean filmmakers are actually doing. Field sets the action in Gros Islet, a real coastal town in the north of the island, grounding the supernatural premise in a recognisable local geography. The premise itself follows the soucouyant as she stalks her next victim through the community, having already claimed eight lives, seeking a replacement for her worn and tortured skin. It is a genuinely eerie concept, the kind that, handled well, could produce something quietly unsettling on a shoestring. The cast includes Aiasha Gustave, Bert Brown, Andy Dupal, Kimhia Toussaint and Bashana Dayes, none of whom will be familiar names to audiences outside the region, though that is hardly unusual for grassroots short filmmaking anywhere in the world. For a sense of how St. Lucian cinema has approached other genres, my review of Luigi (2013), another film from the island, gives some useful comparison. And if you want to see how low-budget horror fares more broadly, my look at Moshari (2022), another horror short, is worth a read alongside this one.

Short horror, at its best, can do things that features cannot, building atmosphere and dread in a compressed space and leaving an audience genuinely rattled in under fifteen minutes. Films like Tiger Stripes (2023), another horror film I have covered on the blog, demonstrate that genre work rooted in specific cultural traditions can punch well above its weight when the execution matches the ambition. Whether Soucouyant manages anything similar, with its folk horror premise and its island setting, is a fair question to bring to a twelve-minute runtime. The building blocks are there on paper: a strong local legend, a specific sense of place, and a subject matter that mainstream horror has left almost entirely untouched.

A-Z World Movie Tour St Lucia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5GCZ2OzYIc There's not alot to like about this movie at all. The acting, the effects, the story.. it's all just really below average. The fact that it's a short and it still feels too long is not a good sign. I think it could have been something really good, especially given that it's a local legend, but it just didn't work.

And that really is the frustrating thing about it. The soucouyant legend deserves better, and St. Lucian cinema deserves a calling card that makes people sit up. Twelve minutes is not long, and yet here it feels padded, which suggests the pacing decisions were doing the film no favours even before the other elements let it down. I keep coming back to what it could have been with a sharper script and a bit more care in front of and behind the camera. Sometimes the gap between a genuinely good idea and a genuinely good film is wider than it looks, and this is one of those cases where that gap stayed open throughout. A shame.

Rating: ★½ | Year: 2015 | Watched: 2025-08-28

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