[rec.]

Having finally forced my Arizona teammates to watch [rec.], perhaps the scariest horror film ever made, I now feel safe in the knowledge that it is a masterpiece of the genre. The first time I watched this I was sat in Houston airport, surrounded by strip-lighting and overweight Americans waiting for our flight. Despite that very real setting, I was totally transported into the terror of this brilliant Spanish film. Following the exploits of a two-person investigative team, that night disclosing the night-shift of the local fire station, we're subjected to a routine call-out to a nearby apartment block that turns very ugly very quickly. We're witnessing the ongoings through the lens of a single camera that keeps rolling and rolling and rolling. It's possible to retain some comfort from the thought that you're experiencing the horror alongside your fellow cameraman. And so, when, for a brief moment, the cameraman extends his camera up at arms length you're suddenly overcome with fear. Divorcing the viewer from the only source of comfort is a genius twist of cinematography that provides one of the scariest bits of cinema I think I've ever seen. Needless to say, my teammates cried out in anguish at the inevitable encounter. I'm trying hard not to spoil the plot for you, as I would hope that you now feel motivated to watch [rec.] yourself. There are even some rumours flying around that the actors were kept in the dark about some of the things that were going to happen, as if we needed any more realism. It won a number of awards on last years' European film festival circuit, including the best foreign language film at the British Film Awards 2007. I hate finishing off these posts with a complaint, but I feel I must. Hollywood has already released an English-language remake merely a year after the original. Unsurprisingly, the trailer contains more plot-spoilers than you could imagine, and the whole production looks too glitzy to embody the same real-life horror that the original so wonderfully captured. (Think The Blair Witch Project remade for Blu-Ray). Why do the American producers think that their audience can't handle subtitles? My colleagues were perfectly fine last night. What's more, they've even changed the name to Quarantine, distancing itself even further from the original, which I'd like to think was at the original director's request, but I fear it may be symptomatic of a typical Hollywood superiority complex. Regardless, go and find [rec.] and watch it. It will scare you like you never thought possible.