The Horned Angel

Star, a lonely teenage girl hardened by a life of abandonment and abuse in a harsh orphanage, reluctantly accepts an invitation from her only friend, Isabel, to attend a concert outside the city. Star doesn’t even like the band — but the prospect of escaping the orphanage, even briefly, feels worth it. When they arrive, Star decides not to go in. Isabel, showing kindness, lends Star her yellow hoodie for the cold night. Waiting for Isabel in the parking lot, Star wanders off, lost in thought as she stares up at the stars — a moment of peace she rarely finds. That moment is shattered when she’s suddenly abducted from behind by a man named Ángel, a deceptively friendly and calm-looking man driven by a disturbing hallucination he calls "Little Brother." Ángel has mistaken Star for Isabel because of the yellow hoodie — and more importantly, because she has the same rare eye color as the final victim he needs. In the shadows of his basement, Ángel is sewing together a grotesque human mannequin from the skin of his previous victims — a "body" he’s preparing for his imaginary sibling. After suffering a childhood accident caused by a senile grandfather, Ángel began experiencing vivid delusions, and "Little Brother" has guided his hands ever since. Star awakens bound in the backseat of Ángel’s car — lips glued shut with shoe adhesive, wrists tied behind her back, and her leg broken by a blow from a baseball bat. Isolated and terrified, she begins slipping between waking nightmares and dreamlike escapes, unsure what’s real. Despite the pain and fear, she slowly starts to strategize her survival, looking for patterns in Ángel’s behavior and moments of weakness. When despair nearly consumes her, a monarch butterfly lands on the car window — a silent, miraculous sign that reminds her of her late grandmother, who adored butterflies. It’s enough to reignite her will to live. Star fights to hold on, psychologically and physically, determined not to become another piece of Ángel’s twisted creation. Eventually, her resistance pays off — she escapes Ángel’s grip in a brutal, desperate act of survival. However, the trauma follows her. Star wakes up in a psychiatric hospital, where the line between reality and hallucination still blurs. She no longer hears Ángel’s voice… but now, disturbingly, she begins to hear the whisper of Little Brother herself.