For decades, the international film industry has been pretty prescriptive about Africa, as it has been with many other places on the fringes of the Hollywood blockbuster machine. Here, we could tell stories of apartheid, famine, civil war, corruption or noble perseverance, preferably all before the closing credits. But no serious filmmaker, heaven forbid, would ever think about making a horror film.
Monsters – not of the particularly human kind – apparently belonged elsewhere.
Then they made Hen.
This week, South African writer-director Nico Scheepers’ unnerving Afrikaans horror became the first African film in the 25-year history of Switzerland’s Neuchâtel International Fantastic Film Festival to win its highest honour, the HR Giger “Narcisse” Award for Best Feature Film. Previous winners include Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later, Gaspar Noé’s Climax, Jeremy Saulnier’s Green Room and André Øvredal’s Troll Hunter – films that have gone on to become modern classics of genre cinema.
The victory is about far more than another trophy for the mantelpiece. It is a declaration that South African cinema doesn’t have to elbow its way onto the world stage with works rooted in historical trauma. There’s no denying that we do have a complex and storied past, but our national storytellers have finally been honoured for revealing that they have imaginations too.
Set on an isolated farm, Hen follows a man who discovers a young boy locked inside a wooden chest surrounded by corpses before taking him home to his wife. It sounds like the opening of an old folk tale told around a dying fire in the Karoo, and that’s its strength. Rather than borrowing from Hollywood horror, Scheepers reaches into something older, stranger, more unsettling and somehow more familiar.
The film has already collected ten awards, with critics praising its stark black-and-white cinematography and composed restraint. There is no musical score and almost no dialogue for the first 18 minutes. Instead, the audience is left alone with little more than wind, birdsong and creaking timber. Modern horror can sometimes mistake volume and gore for terror, but Hen shows that silence can be much more disturbing than another orchestral sting announcing the arrival of someone in a mask and carrying a scythe.
Scheepers puts it beautifully: “I find the silence of isolation far more terrifying than a jump scare. There’s a big difference between a cheap physical fright and something that slowly bores into your brain like a maggot.”
The most unsettling horrors have never really been about monsters anyway. The Shining isn’t about ghosts. Jaws isn’t about a shark. Nosferatu isn’t even really about a vampire. These are all stories about isolation, obsession, the monstrous “other”, madness and the uncomfortable suspicion that civilisation is only one polite agreement from a world in which people want to eat each other.
Scheepers understands this instinctively. Drawing on his childhood on a remote Limpopo farm, he recalls a world where “if the freezer was empty, we loaded the rifle”. That matter-of-fact intimacy with survival permeates every frame. Hen is horror stripped of theatricality, as though someone has unearthed the bones of an ancient nightmare rather than invented one.
Maybe that’s why international audiences have loved it. Fear travels better these days, it seems, than comedy.
Hen arrives at an interesting time for South African storytelling. It follows Variations on a Theme, which won the Tiger Award at the International Film Festival Rotterdam earlier this year; The Heart is a Muscle, which won the Ecumenical Jury Prize at the Berlin International Film Festival; and the drama series Koek, which earned an International Emmy nomination. A single success is one thing; four lauded productions is something to write home about.
Producer Zandré Coetzer says that South African filmmaking is now “export-ready”, but the global appetite isn’t for “African stories” anymore. It’s for great stories about anything from anywhere.
Global streaming is giving local filmmakers the opportunity to tell stories about anything. Hen doesn’t try to explain South Africa to Europe – or even tell a specifically South African story. It doesn’t carry the burden of representation. It just tells a chilling story well, trusting that audiences from Scotland to Switzerland will recognise something universal in its darkness.
If Hen and some of our other local films are anything to go by, our nightmares are proving, in their own strange way, to be just as appealing as our sunshine.
“Nico is a South African talent who deserves a global stage,” says Chanél Muller, Nagvlug Films’ co-owner and producer. “Fear is universal, so we’re not surprised this film has struck a nerve wherever it’s screened. We’ve built Nagvlug Films around collaboration, so this award is for the entire team who poured themselves into Hen.”
• Nagvlug Films’ next releases, Scheepers’ Landmyn (Landmine) and Coetzer’s Silas en die Ysbeer op Tafelberg (Silas and the Polar Bear on Table Mountain), premiere at Silwerskerm in August before opening in South African cinemas in September 2026.
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