Shudder released a new film this past Friday called Terrified (aka Aterrados) and a LOT of buzz has been flying around the internet a few days prior to its release. Most notably Birth.Movies.Death. ran a piece entitled, "Horror Fans: It is Your Moral Imperative to Watch TERRIFIED on Shudder this Weekend". This excited me as well as took me by surprise and the following thoughts immediately flooded my head:
- Birth.Movies.Death. is a publication that I trust when it comes to their genre recommendations.
- Wait, this is the "first" paranormal film to come out of Argentina? GIVE IT TO ME NOW.
- Have I ever seen a film from Argentina? No? Challenge accepted.
- Is it lunch time yet?
- Also, how have I never heard of this before?
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| The original language festival poster. |
My fingers are usually kept pretty close to the pulse of the horror community and upon a cursory Google search I found that other internet publications are declaring that this is one of the scariest movies in modern times, a true gem and, as one site puts it, "scary and cool AF". Now, we've all heard these phrases tossed around before, like a few months ago with the premiere of Hereditary or, if we go further back into the year, with A Quiet Place. Hell, I heard it again earlier this week with the new film Antrum, which is being touted as "the deadliest film ever made". But, if I'm going to be honest, that's all I really need to hear to sell me on a new horror movie. Just the promise of something unique and different is more than enough to get me going and what can do that better than a foreign horror film that everyone is suddenly raving about?
And yeah, sure, just because a horror film is foreign doesn't excuse it from being terrible, but different cultures can provide new insight and context into well worn tropes (I'm thinking of films like Veronica, The Wailing or A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night). And it's this shakeup of modern horror tropes where Demián Rugna's Terrified truly shines. We usually see evil in the form of hauntings as rooted to one specific area, usually a house or a manor, and once your outside (or at least off the property) you're safe. In Terrified, the evil is infectious enough that it can spread, in this case to a couple of close-knit houses located in small neighborhood in Buenos Aires. Each house has its own particular haunting: a couple's life is turned upside down when one of them beings to hear whispering inside her kitchen sink, next door a man is terrified by an elongated man who unfurls from underneath his bed at night, and across the street a mother's sorrow is exacerbated when her recently deceased son returns home and knocks over a glass of milk.
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| Fuck that milk ayyy |
Enter a team of elderly paranormal researchers. Along with a local police officer, the three members each seclude themselves to one of the houses with the intent to solve, soothe and fix what troubles and ails each home. Each localized bit of horror brings with it different elements to create something ultimately captivating and new: possession, reanimation and voyeurism. The film deepens its lore by stating that looking a certain way will unveil things that are usually hidden by the naked eye. Here, angles are everything and will absolutely determine whether you live or die. We see this through one our characters who view things outside a window differently depending on where they are standing or when our police officer is trying to rescue someone from inside a cabinet. Things get really Lovecraftian from here on out and Stuart Gordon's From Beyond and Silent Hill is one of the many films that popped into my head while watching this. It's all great fun until, unfortunately, it isn't.
While the first two acts are genuinely very creepy it all begins to unfold by the third act. Perhaps juggling all these different ideas became too much to handle? Too many loose threads? While ambiguity is something I thoroughly enjoy in films Terrified does so in a way that's much like a fire being doused with a bucket of water. It just... kind of ends. There's no real explanation to why this is all happening outside of some inconsequential mumblings about tap water. Characters do stupid things like sit in front of gigantic cracks in walls where clearly something will come crawling out of. New situations arise from our character's actions, like when a little boy records his dead friend sitting at a kitchen table, but nothing comes of it.
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| Rule no. 1: Stay away from weird cracks. |
