“He got sick.”

One obstacle all first-person horror movies must overcome is the need to justify why somebody on the run from horrible life-threatening monsters would continue to keep the goddamn camera running. Usually the (real-world) filmmakers try to do it with two different stock responses: 1) The camera, some angry other character informs us, makes the cameraperson feel safe, removed, like this isn’t real; 2) People, the cameraperson informs us, just “need to know” what happened. In both cases this usually comes across like sophomore-year media-studies bullshit (nowhere more so than George A. Romero’s depressingly awful Diary of the Dead). While a particularly strong film can add emotional resonance that makes these excuses work by setting up the continued use of the camera a sort of life-preserver for characters on the verge of completely losing it (The Blair Witch Project, for example), you usually just need to think about the camera’s presence the same way you think about hearing explosions in space–you suspend your disbelief in favor of the way it enhances the drama.

[REC] is different, and clever as the dickens. Our in-movie filmmakers aren’t pretentious film students with Marshall McLuhan on the brain or vapid exemplars of the YouTube generation. They’re journalists–puff-piece specialists, yeah, but journalists all the same. Reporter Angela and her cameraman Pablo head out on a ride-along with a couple of firemen for their Insomniac-style human-interest show, so at first their filming is justified by their jobs. Next, they end up locked in a quarantined apartment building by the authorities, despite the presence of several ill and injured people who badly need medical attention; now the filming is a matter of evidence-gathering, a public service on behalf of the frightened and ailing people in the building and a rebuke to the security and health officials who deprive them of both freedom and information. As the horrors mount and filming becomes increasingly impractical in real-world terms, the camera is used as a light source. When the light is broken, the characters navigate via its night vision. At every turn, there’s a reason the camera needs to stay on.

I bring all this up because, as my wife pointed out when I described it to her, that’s a lot more thought and effort on behalf of making the subgenre’s central conceit work than most films of its ilk display. So good for directors Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza and their co-writer Luis Berdejo! But I also mention it because this subterranean current of logic throughout the film is key to the success of its final act, when it hits you with a tidal wave of weird for which you are almost entirely unprepared. All of a sudden, a movie that had been a pretty straightforward, well-acted, effective mash-up of Blair Witch and 28 Days Later or Zach Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead takes a sharp left-turn into Creepyland, somewhere between the farmhouse in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and the collected works of Aphex Twin and Chris Cunningham. It blindsides you and discomfits you mightily, picking up on elements from throughout the entire film in terms of astutely utilizing the first-person camerawork and shoddy lighting to suggest as much as it shows, but blasting those elements right into overdrive. I’ve seen scarier neo-zombie movies, but in terms of sheer narrative smarts, this one’s right up there.

5 Responses to “He got sick.”

  1. Jason says:

    Dude, I was just about to email you to see if you’d gotten the disc, since I hadn’t heard/read anything. Glad you enjoyed it. The Medeiros Girl haunts me still. Shudder.

    Are you gonna bother with Quarantine? I can’t decide.

  2. Yeah, probably. To be honest, the need to constantly flit my eyes to the bottom of the screen to read subtitles probably dialed down the fear factor for [REC]. I imagine an English-language version would probably feel a little more immediate.

    And thank you A TON for sending me the disc!!!

  3. Sean B says:

    Just caught this last night and came here to see if you’d posted your thoughts on it before I wrote up my own opinions. I agree 100% with everything you said. It really was that last ten minutes or so that sold the movie for me – up until then it was decent mash-up of “28 Days Later” and the Resident Evil games, but it just wasn’t getting my adrenaline flowing. Only after they reached the penthouse and started subtly dropping in weird echos of “Blair Witch,” “Silence of the Lambs,” and “Evil Dead” did it really click for me.

    SPOILER

    I assume I read it correctly that the outbreak was the result of an “evil as biological contagion,” as in Carpenter’s “Prince of Darkness” – that demonic possession can be spread like the flu? It was much more effective here in suggestion than it was in that earlier film, I thought.

    And was the possessed girl/woman CG? She really reminded me of Golum mixed with Zelda in the film version of “Pet Semetary,” and I mean that in the best way.

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