Tuesday, October 11, 2011

31 Days of Halloween - Day 11 - Movie 1


A tv show hostess and her cameraman accompany a pair of firefighters on a routine call to an apartment building and find themselves quarantined inside with the building's residents and a contagious disease which turns those infected violent and mindless. It also seems to keep the infected animated after they are killed. Now it's just a matter of trying to stay alive as more and more people become infected.

[Rec] (2007) belongs to the same "found footage" subgenre of horror movies as The Blair Witch Project (1999), Cloverfield (2008) and Paranormal Activity (2007) in which the mere act of survival is substituted for plot and characters. In some aspects this can make for a very effective movie as was the case here because even though the characters were sketches, they behaved like real people, the situation itself was mostly believable and things moved forward quickly and with a build towards a climax. [Rec] has some unsettling moments throughout and makes excellent use of the claustrophobic setting of the building's interior with narrow staircases and hallways. It also effectively uses lighting to show just enough to make the horror aspects even more horrible. There's also some very effective sound design going on in this movie, particularly at the end.

This is worth watching.



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