It’s October So I Watched a Bunch of Horror Movies I’d Never Seen Before: The ‘[REC]’ Franchise

Last year I spent the entire month of October writing about horror movies I’d never seen before. The Reveal’s publication schedule made it unfeasible to reprise that effort as a weekly column this year, so I binged all four ‘[REC]’ movies, then watched the American remake, Quarantine, and its sequel instead.

Were most filmmakers so terrified of The Blair Witch Project that they didn’t dare to make their own found-footage horror films for the better part of a decade? Though a few films attempted to pick up where it left off, the found-footage field lay relatively fallow for the better part of the ’00s. A few factors help explain why. For starters, The Blair Witch Project —for which co-directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez sent a trio of actors into the woods with video cameras and only a loose script—was a daring, even dangerous undertaking. It would be difficult to replicate and difficult to sell that conceit in a market that saw Blair Witch as a fluke. (Even the rushed but conceptually intriguing sequel, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, ditched the found-footage approach for a more traditional style.) What’s more, though Blair Watch was a low-budget film, shooting found-footage horror wouldn’t become nearly as budget-friendly until digital cameras became more widely available.

By 2007, all that started to change. Though it wouldn’t reach theaters for two more years, Paranormal Activity, the most influential of the delayed wave of post-Blair Witch found-footage films, created a stir with its October premiere at Screamfest. A few weeks before, George Romero debuted Diary of the Dead at Toronto, shifting his undead movies into the found-footage realm. Around the same time, Paramount began promoting an upcoming January 2008 release called Cloverfield via a cryptic marketing campaign. And in Spain, moviegoers turned a film called [REC] into a hit, though it would take a while for North America to catch up. (More on that in a bit.) Co-directed by Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza—who largely worked independently of one another before and after the [REC] series—the film opens with what appears to be outtakes from an episode of While You’re Sleeping, a fluffy news show filmed in after-hours Barcelona. Manuela Velasco stars as the show’s host, Angela, who lets the occasional crack slip into her winning smile when she talks to her cameraman Pablo (Pablo Rosso). This gig is clearly meant to be a stepping stone to bigger things. Did she really become a journalist so she could hang out with a bunch of firemen working the graveyard shift?

Then Angela’s night takes a turn when she accompanies a crew on a seemingly ordinary call. An elderly woman named Mrs. Izquierdo (Martha Carbonell) has been heard screaming by others in the aging apartment building she calls home, where a culturally diverse group of residents have gathered to express their concerns, not realizing that they should get out while they still can. The visit to Mrs. Izquierdo’s apartment goes poorly, to put it mildly, which comes as no surprise to the armed forces gathered outside, who seal up the building, trapping Angela, Pablo, the building’s residents, several firefighters, and a police officer inside with a zombie population that grows every time a new victim gets bitten.