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Nation of ori­gin: Spain

Rat­ings:
Justin: 5 out of 5
Kim: 5 out of 5

Notes:

So early in the game to say this, but this may be the best film we will watch all Octo­ber. Why is it that Spain and France get that you can ter­rify the pants off of peo­ple with a shoe­string bud­get and some tal­ent far more effec­tively than if you cram a bunch of actors and CGI into an overblown “pop­corn movie” with a big bud­get. I didn’t see Quar­an­tine (the Amer­i­can ver­sion of this film) and now that I have seen this movie, I prob­a­bly won’t. [Rec] is shot using one cam­era, and the cam­era­man is a char­ac­ter in the film, so it doesn’t get any more immer­sive than that. This film is like being stuck inside of the most exclu­sive and awe­some haunted house ever. I don’t bother to research the pro­duc­tion of these films but I am going to guess that after some­one came up with the idea of putting the cam­era­man in the action (thereby obscur­ing the “its only a movie” ele­ment) they came up with the idea of throw­ing a bunch of zom­bies and falling bod­ies at him with the hopes that, if they could con­vinc­ingly scare the guy hold­ing the cam­era, they could scare the audience.

They suc­ceeded. All of the lights are on in my apart­ment right now.

The voyeuris­tic aspect of the cam­era work is fuck­ing eerie, too. You know that scene in the orig­i­nal Hal­loween where you see an out of focus Michael Myers pop up in the back­ground and in the fore­ground Jamie Lee Cur­tis has no idea that he’s still alive, and she looks so relieved and no one knows but the audi­ence that shit is about to get ugly? Yeah, well this whole movie is like that.

While Blair Witch might get credit for pio­neer­ing the removal of the 4th wall in hor­ror films, I don’t think think they came close to this. The wonky cam­era work in Blair Witch was kind of nau­se­at­ing, where the premise in[Rec] is that, the cam­era­man is on an assign­ment for a local news show. So Pedro its totally plau­si­ble that he knows what he’s doing behind the cam­era well enough so that you don’t feel sea­sick dur­ing the whole film. What Blair Witch and this film prove, though, is that fear isn’t about pros­thetic makeup, CGI effects, unstop­pable killing machines or wan­ton gore and blood; its about what you can’t see. It will always be more fright­en­ing to hear bang­ing noises and some­one scream­ing in the next room and not know what’s hap­pen­ing than it will be to see the mon­ster attack­ing your neigh­bor. Take notes, Hol­ly­wood. When you remake these films you miss the point completely.