Being one of several movies of the last years to take the “live on tape” approach as Cloverfield, Diary of the Dead, The Last Horror Movie and Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon, REC starts out as routine shoot for the TV Show, “While You Where Sleeping”. Skipping the customary title sequences , we go straight from the production companies logos, to the first frame, where we instantly are introduced to the female protagonist, Angela, [Manuela Velasco] and off camera her photographer Pablo [Pablo Rosso]. Tonight we see them on location at a fire station, as Angela re-shoots her opening monologue. What Balagueró and Plaza set out to do next is a very effective way of working in personal traits and character as we spend the next fifteen minutes rolling on the rather tedious night at the fire station setting up Angela, Paco, and the firemen Manu and Álex. Nothing much happens and Angela feels her story going down the drain. Suddenly the alarm goes off calling the firemen, followed by the camera team to an apartment complex where neighbors have heard strange noises from an older woman’s apartment. Pretty soon all hell breaks loose as the woman in the flat attacks the security guard that assisted the camera team and firemen to the flat. When they get to the bottom of the stairwell to aid the wounds of the security guard they are greeted by a blinding white light and learn that they have been locked in the building by officials, due to Chemical or Biohazard reasons. Angela tells Paco to keep rolling no matter what, as they start searching for exits from the building. It’s then that they realize that the people who get bitten or attacked re-animate as bloodthirsty beings. In a high paced tempo the fight for survival starts, one by one the inhabitants meet their deaths until Angela and Paco find themselves face to face with the virus originator at the top of the building in a an abandoned penthouse apartment. Here they learn of strange experiments on an acclaimed possessed child, and realize that there is something else threatening them in the penthouse as the battery running the camera light dies. Paco switches to night vision and sees a strange distorted figure roaming through the darkness. It’s apparent that the being is searching for them in the pitch black. Suddenly the creature finds Paco and as it bludgeons him to death Angela reaches out for the camera. As she crawls towards the camera, something grabs her and pulls her away from the line of vision into the shadows behind her. She screams as she vanishes into the darkness.
ConstructingHorror.com
REC is a fine example of how European directors are once again making an impact on the horror genre. Already remade for a US market as Quarantine, screenwriter/directors Jaume Balagueró & Paco Plaza (With Luis Berdejo screenwriting REC, and Manu Díez, Balagueró’s co-writer on 2005’s The Nun replacing him in the screenwriting group this time around) are already full at work shooting the sequel REC2.
Storytelling highlights.
• Straight forward linear narrative with a disclosed ending.
Many of the movies in the let us call it, “modern technology” niche, like Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust, Sanchez & Myricks’ The Blair Witch Project, and George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead establish from a starting point that the footage you are about to see is all that remains of the crew, team, and vision of the director. You understand that what you are watching is the path leading up to this or these characters certain death, as you where told in the opening of the movie. This works in two ways, on one hand the fact that the person’s you are watching is dead, sometimes sets an empathetic tone towards the protagonist from the start of the film. These poor people die. In some cases this sympathy shifts towards disgust as in Cannibal Holocaust, sometimes it doesn’t and it gets you in the gut. But there’s always a gamble at stake when you set that assertion. If your characters don’t pay off that empathy you awoke within the audience, they are going to loose interest in them, which is the unfortunate case of Romero’s Diary of the Dead. It’s hard to feel empathetic towards Jason Creed, even though we are told that “this is his document, assembled in his memory” after his death. He never shows any real feelings to what he’s documenting throughout the film, so the audience won’t give him any emotions back as they have nothing to relate to. Put that in contrast to Heather in The Blair Witch Project and it’s quite clear. She cries, screams, snots all over the lens and begs forgiveness for putting her friends and their family’s through this terrible ordeal. From here on the audience honestly feel pity towards this poor girl, who even though she acted like a complete bitch in several previous scenes, finally exposes her true feelings and wins back the audience empathy at the end of the movie. Now they don’t want to rush forth to her untimely death.
REC doesn’t set this premise, and as the audience has no indicators to how the narrative will end, it keeps a wider possibility for Angela and Paco to make it out of the besieged house alive. In difference to the films mentioned above this sets a larger threat, and or possibilities for the protagonist as we don’t know where this is going to end up. Will they break down the doors and escape, will they be let out, will Paco make it out, will it be Angela, or will they all meet that terrible death, no one can tell because of the disclosed ending.
• Establishing an ordinary world to sell the horror.
The opening thirteen minutes of REC take their time to build up to the first attack. An ordinary world is established where ordinary people go about their ordinary business. The firemen eat dinner and work out, nothing weird or strange there TV Journalist Angela laughs when the firemen make jokes and she’s getting good footage for her shot, she sighs when nothing happens. There’s nothing strange going on here at all. They get an alarm during a fun game of basketball. We get a laugh, taking the tension off what may come, when Paco says that he has to take the stairs, he can’t go down the pole with the camera. Angela flubs one of her introductions as they ride the fire engine to the scene of emergency. All this acts as a reminder that this is all on tape, Angela can re-shoot the line later. Nothing unusual there, it’s all just another day at work in the ordinary world. Even in the early scenes at the house, there are several remarks to the camera team as the older security guard points out that when he tells them to turn off the camera they have to turn it off. Angela replies that they have permits, the security guard. Acknowledges this and they move up the stairs. There’s nothing strange about the camera team and the scenes we are seeing. People stare into the camera, as they do in reality; they seem uncomfortable that there is a lens in their faces. We do not stray from the path leading us though the ordinary world until the initial attack in the apartment. The undead stalk the corridors, secrets are kept by government officials, paranoia runs astray, children attack their mothers, and monsters roam the attic… Welcome to the unnatural world, a world of horror. As we recognize the ordinary world as a world we can relate to, it helps us shift into and accept the horror world as a real world, as the story has been set up as an ordinary world.
• Exposition built into story.
We get a very detailed description of the geography of the building and its inhabitants when Angela and Manu help Sergio gather information of who is still upstairs in the building. We learn of two possible “zombies” still up there, and that the strange penthouse flat on the top floor that is owned by a man living in a different town. The threat has been built into the story in an effective way, that beats “bump, scrape” all look up and ask what was that?
The interview section some 30 minutes in sees reality show formatted interviews shot in their entirety to later in the editing of the “show” be cut into sequences that will be interwoven with the final program. It’s a very unconventional and innovative way narrative, but it’s also a great way to let the audience know “inner thoughts” of the characters and explain the fears they are experiencing. Here we learn that the mother of the child is afraid as “there is something up there! Why else are people thrown down the stairs all bloody and dead!” We take part of Cesar’s racial views as he blames the Chinese living in the house, because “They eat fish and scream and yell all the time”… Pieces of information that otherwise couldn’t have been presented to the audience naturally as they are inner thoughts. This relieves the film of those painful spots that frequent the genre where someone has to “explain” what is going on, what people are thinking and why this is happening, those uncomfortable moments where you also might see a flashback to something completely different.
• Character Dynamics:
It’s also though this long exposition that we find interesting character traits of Angela. The two sided cynicism of the TV producer. As long as the camera is rolling on her with a show guest she’s her sweet, naïve host alter ego is on display, but when the camera is in-between content shots her true face is revealed. Her Modus Operandi is plain and simple, keep the cameras rolling, and get the best story possible. Paco is forced to keep rolling, because the producer in Angela knows that she’s sitting on a story that will definitely make an impact. First the strange events in the upstairs apartment, second the lockdown, next the shooting of the old woman, finally their fight for survival. But in her obsession to create that great document, her drive becomes the downfall of her and Paco.
These traits can be seen throughout REC, as Angela shifts from cynic producer to sacred woman, back to cynical producer and finally scared to death that she’s going to die in the house. Our empathy for her shifts on several occasions, we like her when she is engaged and tries to go about her job. She’s an ambitious young woman. We dislike her when she starts pushing Paco into keeping the camera rolling, shouldn’t they be focusing on getting out? When Sergio demands that Paco turns off the camera after learning about the lockdown, Angela yells so harsh at him that she puts herself above the law. Then we again find compassion with her as she realizes that this is all going pear shaped really fast, and they might not get out alive causing her to plead for her life.
• Bad Confusion & Chance.
One of the things that are disappointing with REC is the way the audience finds out about Tristana Medeiros, the “creature” in the attic. It’s only by chance that snippets of information connected with the newspaper clippings put the story together, as Angela plays and rewinds the reel to reel recorder strategically placed on the table. It’s effective and it works as it forces the audience to solve the puzzle, but it is the weakest link of the movie, as a few minutes earlier the power shorted out plunging the house into darkness. The second let down is the scene when Paco uses the night vision mode of his camera to see what is in the crawlspace above the attic after the hatch falls down. It’s a great scene, and a guaranteed shock moment, but confusing, as the audience have no clue what so ever to what that child was doing up there. The filmmakers should have gone with the feet of Medeiros’s harrowed body as she walks by the camera as that would have given the same effect, and opened a possibility that their curiosity is what finally released the monster. Their own struggle for survival leads to their deaths. How wonderfully nihilistic wouldn’t that be on top of the downbeat ending.
