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.

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