Your films seem to move between psychological horror, underground cinema, and disturbing atmospheres. How did your approach to horror film production begin?

It began in childhood, honestly. I grew up in video rental stores, in the horror section. The covers alone were an education in dread. I would rent films I probably shouldn't have been watching at that age, and something in me was permanently shaped by that experience. The darkness on those screens felt like a language I already understood. As I grew older, that instinct never left, it only deepened and eventually demanded to be expressed rather than just consumed. Making horror films felt inevitable.

In works like Oscuridad del Sur, there is a strong focus on visual aesthetics and emotional tension. How important is it for you to create a recognizable visual identity in your films?

Deeply important. I do want a recognizable brand. I want someone to see a frame from one of my films without any context and know immediately whose world they are looking at. But that brand cannot be built artificially, it has to grow from something genuine. What I am building is a consistency of feeling, a specific interior world that has its own gravity, its own rules, its own texture. Argento built entire emotional universes through color and music. Fulci let rot and decay become almost abstract paintings. Those were not aesthetic choices divorced from meaning, they were the meaning itself. I aspire to that kind of coherence, where the visual signature and the emotional truth are inseparable. When people see my work, I want there to be no doubt about whose darkness they are inside.

Independent horror cinema often has to deal with economic and production limitations. What has been the most difficult challenge you faced while making your projects?

The hardest challenge is always maintaining artistic integrity under real material constraints. Independent horror is made with sacrifice (time, resources, sleep, sometimes personal stability). But the deepest challenge is psychological. You are asking cast, crew, and collaborators to trust a vision that exists only in your mind, to commit fully to something dark and demanding. Building that trust, holding that creative space together under pressure is where independent filmmaking truly tests you.

Your work carries a very dark and unsettling atmosphere, almost like a nightmare. When you write or produce a film, do you start first from the imagery, the story, or the emotions you want to convey to the audience?

It genuinely depends on the project. With A Morte Não Se Farta (Death Always Craves) the title came first. Everything else was built around it, including the story, which was carefully shaped to fit within our budgetary limitations. That title carried such a specific gravity that it became the seed of everything.

More typically, though, the process begins with a theme I feel compelled to examine, something unresolved or disturbing living in my thinking. From that theme, the emotions emerge, and only at the end does the imagery crystallize. The visuals are almost like the final layer of skin over something that already has a skeleton and a heartbeat.

Many horror directors use the genre as a social or psychological metaphor. Is there a recurring theme or personal fear that you feel compelled to explore through your cinema?

Isolation. I am obsessed with the isolation that exists between people even when they are close, the fundamental inability to truly know another person or to be truly known. There is also a recurring preoccupation with the collapse of identity, what happens when the self begins to dissolve, when the line between who we are and what we fear disappears entirely. Mental decline fascinates and terrifies me in equal measure, the slow erosion of the mind, the way a person can become a stranger to themselves, losing grip on memory, on reality, on the coherence of their own inner world. 

Which horror films and directors have influenced your style the most? Are there any works you consider essential to your artistic formation?

The directors who shaped me most deeply are those who understood that horror is a form of poetry. Dario Argento for the way he weaponized color and music into pure visceral terror. José Mojica Marins, Zé do Caixão, for proving that horror rooted in a specific cultural darkness can achieve something universal and deeply subversive. John Carpenter for his mastery of atmosphere and restraint. And Tobe Hooper for that raw, relentless American dread that never lets you breathe. These are the filmmakers who taught me what the genre is truly capable of.

Horror audiences today are increasingly drawn to extreme and immersive experiences. In your opinion, how is contemporary horror cinema evolving, especially within the independent Latin American scene?

Latin American independent horror is undergoing something extraordinary right now. There is a generation of filmmakers who are no longer looking to replicate Hollywood formulas, we are drawing from our own mythologies, our own traumas, our own specific darkness. The political and social weight that this continent carries gives our horror a different gravity. It is rooted in real violence, real institutional horror. What makes this even more remarkable is that it happens largely without adequate institutional support. Cultural organizations in the region offer very little in the way of real financing for genre cinema, horror especially is treated as unworthy of investment. What exists here is being built almost entirely through personal sacrifice and lateral collaboration. Despite that, or perhaps because of it, the work is vital.

Can you tell us something about your future projects? Are you already developing new films or ideas that will explore even darker and more experimental territories?

There is a great deal in motion. Oscuridad del Sur is now fully completed, A Morte Não Se Farta is in post-production and will soon be released to audiences, that is a moment I have been working toward for a long time, and I am ready for people to finally experience it.

Beyond that, I am developing a Christmas-themed anthology in collaboration with Balraj Kang, starring the remarkable Laurence Harvey, a project that takes the iconography of the holiday season and subverts it into something deeply unsettling. There is something particularly disturbing about corrupting nostalgia, and this anthology goes to those dark places without hesitation.

Within the found footage space, I am working on Red Lips, featuring Zoe Angeli, a screenlife project with a strong visual identity. Then there is Cast, a collaboration with Michael Masurkevitch, found footage pushing isolation themes. I am also developing several screenplays together with Rhonnie Fordham, a collaboration that excites me deeply. Found footage, when handled with real intentionality, can create a proximity to dread that no other format achieves quite the same way. 

And finally Anauê, developed alongside Ramiro Giroldo, a work that draws on something deeply rooted in Brazilian soil, in the ancestral and the disturbing. For this project, Jess Franco and Jean Rollin are big inspirations.