[REC] is a 2007 Spanish film which was remade barely 1 year later as the English language Quarantine. It was written and directed by John Erik Dowdle, who was responsible for the cult found footage movie The Poughkeepsie Tapes. GIFs from that have been making their way around the internet as some of the most damned creepy scenes ever.
The premise of both movies is that a news channel reporter is shadowing the local fire department as a human interest story for a late-night news show when they receive a call to rescue an elderly woman trapped inside her apartment. When they arrive, the woman is covered in blood and very aggressive. She ends up biting one of the responders. When they attempt to evacuate the responder to the hospital they discover the police and the army have surrounded the building in a quarantine as part of Biological, Chemical, or Nuclear response. The rest of the movie follows the group of tenants as their group slowly fractures and becomes infected with something very similar to a Zombie virus (à la 28 Days Later) until the only survivors are the newscaster and her cameraman who take refuge in the attic apartment where they discover the source of the disease before being murdered by patient 0.
People criticize the remake quite a bit for being mostly a shot-for-shot remake of the original with very little original spin. After watching both movies, that complaint seems to come mostly from hipsters who believe foreign movies are better by virtue of being foreign movies, who believe English language remakes of foreign movies are always bad because we Americans have no sense of what makes a scary movie and bulldoze over the subtlety and superior sense of horror that foreign movies innately posses.
[REC] by itself is a great movie, it's claustrophobic, shocking, and creepy. It's bloody, and violent without becoming an action movie. The film is a testament to the found footage genre. It's terrifying without doing much over most of its running time and despite a minor stumble during the last 10 minutes has what might be one of the most terrifying final 5 minutes of any movie. EVER. I am not kidding, the end of this movie was beyond scary. I will admit that it was harder to get into because it relies extensively on very fast paced storytelling, which is difficult when reading subtitles. I have no particular hatred of subtitles, but they do make things a little harder to follow. Especially in something that moves this quickly. Even with that against it, it's a truly great movie in its own right.
The remake acknowledges this by being 90% the same. However, the remake is shot with a better sense of composition and pacing. They've created a few new scenes that didn't exist in the original movie that serve very well to heighten or maintain the tension established in previous shots. One of these new scenes is the reason it took me 3 tries to finish the movie for the first time. It's truly something I didn't want to watch. Some of the more subtle effects were used to extend the capabilities of the zombies so that their movements threw them into a very uncomfortable part of the uncanny valley. Also, an issue I had with [REC] was that it looked like the majority of it took place during the day and was very well lit from outside the building. This didn't make sense for something set during the overnight shift of a fire department. Quarantine had much better lighting.
The running time of the remake is ~89 minutes and the running time or the original is ~78 minutes.
I was more affected and more frightened by the first 82 minutes of the remake, but the final 7 or so minutes are far more scary than the remake's finale. The original takes a minor tangent into religious explanation for the events before abandoning it right before the end. After this weird religion thing it becomes far creepier than the remake.
Either way, this original is great and the remake is really a remake done right where the original is adapted and expanded on to make it better for the target audience.
Tomorrow night we check out the movie that kicked off modern found footage revival: The Blair Witch Project.
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