Jaume Balagueró - Paco Plaza
REC

Horror is a film genre full of contradictions: often underestimated, used by producers, especially American ones, as a machine to make easy money, blamed as the cause of the most violent and unmentionable psychic pathologies, guilty of sleepless nights or criminal attempts at emulation. And yet, probably, it is the best example that the seventh art can offer to explore the human soul and its deepest urges. A way to tell how far we can push both our imagination and our propensity for the charm that Evil has always exerted.

Despite this, there are few horror films worthy of this genre as old as cinema itself. Very few. REC is a pleasant exception in recent years coming from Spain. The Balaguerò/Plaza duo signs a masterpiece of tension packaged in the best possible way, with a script without any smudges, practically perfect. Just to be clear, nothing original: the technique of a fake direct take documentary was imported into the horror world decades earlier by us Italians (remember Deodato's "Cannibal Holocaust"?) and then reached global success with "The Blair Witch Project". Even the zombie effect, albeit with some modifications (the "creatures" in REC aren't slow like Romero's zombies) will not appear as an innovative element. Yet, during the viewing, we will always have the feeling of something "unseen", a clear sign of an excellent product that relies precisely on tension, anxiety, and terror.

Terror that soon becomes claustrophobia: we are trapped in a building in the center of Barcelona (Rambla de Catalunya 34, if you're as sick as I am and go there to take photos) together with journalist Angela Vidal and cameraman Pablo, who will film everything to the end. Around us are the building's tenants: some seem normal, others have turned into something horrible, a kind of very nervous, aggressive, fast-moving blood-spitters, obviously hungry for human flesh. Soon, the authorities outside block all escape routes, completely isolating those inside: an epidemic? A plague? We no longer care: our only concern is survival. And so the terror from claustrophobia becomes voyeurism: we want to see, we want to look into every room of the building, we want to discover all the secrets of those who are still "normal", we want to go up to the last floor, where in the darkness of a dilapidated apartment lies the truth that will explain (almost) everything. "Keep filming," Angela whispers in the last shots, the most evocative and unsettling.

Winner of various titles, including 2 Goya Awards, and presented out of competition at the 64th Venice International Film Festival, REC manages to express a sense of continuous horror that avoids falling into the clichés of horror cinema or predictable and hackneyed situations. No ridiculous splatter trick, no sensationalistic red paint splashes, no shocking special effects that only provoke squeals from virgin girls in cinemas full of teenagers, no well-known faces in the cast (which makes everything even more realistic).

A technical masterpiece that, riding on the wave of its success, unfortunately spawned two sequels: REC 2, also by the Balaguerò/Plaza duo (mediocre, pompous, but watchable) and the horrible, shameful, indecent, terrible REC 3, this time directed only by Plaza, evidently devoid of personal dignity.