A lean 78-minutes, the first 15 minutes is crucial to the success of this film. While very little happens, we get a terrific sense of the pluck and brashness of Manuela Velasco’s reporter, Angela Vidal. There’s an instant likeability, which almost but not quite conceals her sense of job entitlement and her anxious desire for something exciting to happen. We also get how directors Jaume Balaguero and Paco Plaza plan to use the single-camera technique to enhance the suspense. The opening has small moments of sound differences, jump cut edits and offbeat framings. Very natural beats during the opening dull patch that establish the rules. This helps out a lot when the real scary stuff hits later on.
That’s one reason why [REC] is one of the best found-footage horror films. The camera isn’t a gimmick. It really is the best way to tell this story. The film doesn’t create false excitement with a shaky camera. It maximizes the horror because you don’t know what you’re going to see, and the filmmakers don’t give you the choice of looking away. There are very few pans to people reacting to the terror. It happens right in front of our lens.
The first scare scene is a fairly typical zombie moment. This actually helps because it lowers expectations. You think maybe the film won’t be that special, but the next moment lands perfect. By the 3rd scare I was in for the ride. That being said, it’s not all horror climaxes either. There’s some great character building after the first wave of horror. We quickly become familiar with these people, and learn to like (or mistrust) them before the tension seeps back in. Throughout, the script drops clues into the casual conversation, explaining how this happened without stopping momentum for pointless exposition.
The last 30min is where [REC] really earns its pedigree. The shocks come hard and fast and from different directions at once. The people and the camera don’t know which way to look, and everyone quickly runs out of safe places to hide. The film becomes a great haunted house film with uneasy, surprise attacks and some real chilling screams. (Never underestimate the power of an effective sound mix. Some of the animalistic screams here are like nothing you’ve heard.) I watch a lot of horror films, but [REC] accomplishes the rare feat of terrifying me to the point where I was genuinely afraid of what was going to happen at the end.
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