[REC]

The television journalist Angela Vidal is intent on documenting, together with her cameraman Pablo, the life of the firefighters of Barcelona on duty during the night hours. The firefighters receive a call from an apartment building in the city center where it seems that an accident has occurred to an elderly lady. The journalist goes with them, but soon finds herself documenting a situation of pure horror: in the building, a contagion is spreading that turns the infected into rabid, bloodthirsty madmen. The health authorities block all escape routes to contain the contagion, so for the residents of the building, the journalist, her colleague, and the firefighters the only goal is to survive. Horror cinema is trying to change. Beyond the themes and topics addressed, which follow safe paths and often rummage through the great successes of the past, it is the language used and the staging that seek the element of novelty. It seems that the horror cinema of the latest years has found this novelty in the morbid ostentation of horror and in the pornography of the visible: to show everything, always and in the most gory detail, to the point of explaining the condition of the viewer in that of the voyeur, natural evolution-exasperation of the postmodern homo videns. It started with the search for emotional shock, reaching the peaks of the visual endurance of the viewer thanks to the subjection to various butchery shows that have given the horror fan the torture porn of "Saw" and "Hostel", up to the extreme revisionism of old myths of the first postmodernity reread with copious shedding of hemoglobin, as happened in the various remakes-prequels of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and "Halloween". But the real point of no return of this trend is quite different and can be called "reality horror". We are facing a new language, a visual and narrative technique that transports the viewer inside the film and brings his eye to coincide with the eye of the protagonist and at the same time with the eye of the camera. The involvement is total and the film, more than a pastime to be enjoyed with pure relaxation function, becomes an experience that transports and makes the viewer an active participant in the narration as well. The first example of reality horror can be considered "The Blair Witch Project" even though here we find ourselves in an emblematic case in which the morbidity of the vision is accompanied by the frustration of the non-vision: it is decided to suggest and never show, leave everything to the free interpretation and the suggestion of the viewer, it is up to the voyeur and his sensitivity to attribute a meaning to the more or less disturbing images that crowd the screen. Despite the great worldwide success, the technique from there baptized "the Blair Witch" has not been much frequented by filmmakers and has been seen sporadically in low-budget productions such as the American "The St. Francisville Experiment", the Japanese "Noroi" and the Italian "Road to L.". Then it was Spain's turn and "[REC]" arrived, produced by Filmax of Julio Fernandez and directed by Jaume Balagueró ("Fragile") and Paco Plaza ("I delitti della luna piena"). From our parts "[REC]" was distributed after "Cloverfield", the monster movie produced by J.J. Abrams which in reality is subsequent to the Spanish film. The two films, although they result similar for the language used, are very different from each other and pursue different purposes as well. If "Cloverfield" focused on the evocation of real fears to which the citizens of New York have been witnesses and used cutting-edge technologies such as videophones and the YouTube aesthetic, "[REC]" focuses more on TV reality, using the language of the television service and reaching more directly the stomach of the viewer. There is not much room for socio-political reflection, therefore, but rather the path of more direct and bloody genre cinema is attempted, capable of scaring almost in the old-fashioned way, without neglecting an intrinsic criticism of the current media system. In doing so, "[REC]", although it is a pure reality horror, slightly betrays its class of belonging, resulting more artificial and "fake", if we want to say cinematic. The tension is constantly at its peak and the viewer's involvement is definitely very high, but there is a certain care for the framing, always very attentive to show everything and well, and narrative developments that explain the existence of a screenplay from a "real" film, thus entering into contradiction with the realistic pretext of the entire work. What clearly emerges from the film by Balagueró and Plaza is a manifest criticism of the sensationalism of the journalistic service, thus mocking the hypocrisy of modern reality TV that dominates television networks around the world. The desire to film horror at all costs for the sole purpose of making a scoop is here taken to the extreme, translating precisely into the discourse of showing everything in the most morbid and explicit way possible. A TV addicted to reality that translates into a reality addicted to TV, "Everyone must know what is happening" combined with "Film Pablo...Did you film?...Do you have it?". The two Spanish directors lead the work with a great sense of rhythm and do not spare twists and moments of genuine terror. The last 15 minutes of "[REC]" are indeed a real punch in the stomach and a killer for the heart patients, because, thanks to a video game survival horror aesthetic, they manage to convey an impressive sense of anxiety and bring on stage suggestive and highly macabre images. Even the blood is shown in abundance on the screen and the fury of the infected, accompanied by screams of rage and pain, makes the skin crawl. It must be said that "[REC]" is very derivative and in essence does not offer much that is really new, there is a lot of "Demons 2", of "28 Days Later", of "Dawn of the Dead"; in the end in "[REC]" the important thing is not what is said, but how it is said, and I am not referring only to the "Blair Witch" hand-held camera technique, but rather to the real sense of fear that Balagueró and Plaza have managed to convey using old expedients like cinema and already seen situations; in the end watching this film is a bit like taking a ride on a roller coaster. Much applause to the two directors, much applause to the genre here proud of its nature, much applause to "[REC]", one of the most straightforwardly terrifying films of recent years.