General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20264 min read

Frankelda's Book of Spooks

Frankelda's Book of Spooks (Sustos Ocultos de Frankelda) is a Mexican stop-motion animated horror anthology series for children, created by the brothers Arturo and Roy Ambriz Rendón of the Mexico City studio Cinema Fantasma. It premiered in October 2021 on Cartoon Network Latin America and HBO Max, and its single season runs 70 minutes over five episodes of roughly 14 minutes each.¹^•²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Original title	Sustos Ocultos de Frankelda; original language Spanish¹
Creators	Arturo and Roy Ambriz Rendón, founders of Cinema Fantasma¹
Premiere	October 29, 2021, on Cartoon Network Latin America and HBO Max³
Format	One season, 5 episodes, 70 minutes total, about 14 minutes per episode²
Main cast	Mireya Mendoza (Frankelda), Arturo Mercado Jr. (Herneval), Luis Leonardo Suárez (Mansion)⁴
Awards	Quirino Awards for Best Animated Series and Best Animation Design; 2022 Crystal Pine winner for Best Original Song²^•⁴
Follow-up	Soy Frankelda (I Am Frankelda), billed as Mexico's first independent stop-motion feature film and a prequel to the series, released in Mexico in October 2025⁵

Spoilers

Premise and structure

The series follows Frankelda, a phantom writer who is literally a ghost, and Herneval, her grumpy but faithful enchanted book. Trapped in a sentient haunted house, the two tell terrifying stories in which girls and boys encounter monsters that embody their deepest fears. The monsters, known as "los sustos" (the spooks), include gnomes, witches, sirens, and the Coco, and they rely on human fear to stay alive.¹^•⁶

The anthology format gives each episode a different cast of characters, while the framing story drops hints about the tragic past shared by Frankelda and Herneval. The final episode reveals the origins of Frankelda and of the book in which she writes her stories, and it was the episode that generated the most audience engagement, according to the Ambriz brothers.²^•⁷ Reviewers describe the moral of the tales as "be careful what you wish for": children trade something of themselves to a monster in exchange for help, always at a price.⁸

Production

Cinema Fantasma, founded in 2011 by the Ambriz brothers, produced the series entirely in Mexico, from art direction through editing and scoring; the brothers have described it as the most ambitious stop-motion production made in the country up to that time.⁹ The project took 20 months to complete, much of it during the pandemic, and involved 150 people, 42 sets, 122 puppets, 1,350 props, and 140,000 photographs.¹⁰

The brothers have described the series as a homage to Mexico City: stories are set in locations such as the Condesa neighborhood, Xochimilco, and the English cemetery of Real del Monte in Hidalgo.¹⁰ Music is central to the series, with each spook getting its own musical number; critics have singled out the songs and the polyphonic scoring as a strength alongside the craft of the animation.⁶^•⁸

Reception and awards

At the Quirino Awards for Ibero-American animation, the series won Best Animated Series and Best Animation Design.² It also won the 2022 Crystal Pine award for Best Original Song and was nominated for Best Original Score for a Series or Limited Series, as well as a Hollywood Music in Media Awards nomination for Main Title, TV Show (Foreign Language).⁴ On the aggregator JustWatch it holds a user rating of 8.3 from 761 votes.¹¹

The series streams on HBO Max and through the HBO Max Amazon Channel, and is available in English, Spanish, and Portuguese audio.¹¹

The prequel film

The series ended on a cliffhanger, and rather than a second season the project grew into a feature film. Soy Frankelda (I Am Frankelda), directed by the Ambriz brothers, is billed as Mexico's first independent stop-motion feature film. Set in 19th-century Mexico, it tells the origin story of a young writer who travels into her subconscious and confronts the characters from her own spooky stories.⁵^•⁷

Guillermo del Toro mentored the film, which premiered at the Guadalajara International Film Festival in June 2025 and opened in Mexican theaters on October 23, 2025. It drew more than 600,000 cinemagoers and grossed over MXN $49.8 million (about US $2.86 million), and reached Netflix on June 12 in Spanish with subtitles and in an English dub.⁵^•¹²

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026