Looking Back at [REC]: Second Best Found Footage Horror Ever

A recent rewatch of the Spanish [REC] convinced me that it is not only one of the best horror films made in the found footage aesthetic, but perhaps also the only one from the already long list of horror films pretending to be authentic that almost constantly does not let us forget what it is.

Shot in 2007 by Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza, the film reveals its convention in the very first seconds, when the main character, a young, smiling journalist, speaks directly to the camera: Good evening, my name is Angela Vidal, after which she makes a mistake in her introduction and cuts the take, correcting herself and explaining to the viewers that they are watching an evening television program. This illusion holds almost until the very end, uninterrupted even by the opening credits, which simply are not here, and intensified by Angela’s constant attempts to give the whole thing the form of a report, and above all by her countless reminders to the unseen cameraman to keep recording.

The title, after all, means exactly that – the film finds its meaning in the necessity of recording, even when logic dictates pressing the STOP button. [REC] is therefore a little over a 70-minute block of raw material from which an episode of a television program devoted to the work of firefighters at night was to be created. Nothing extraordinary, not even particularly interesting – when the journalist hears from one of the subjects of her report that sometimes nothing happens all night, she quietly tells the camera that she would prefer the alarm at the fire station to go off and for something to happen.

Of course, horror as a genre loves to fulfill such wishes, which is why shortly afterward Angela sets off with two firefighters to help a woman trapped in a tenement building. The professionalism of the main character is admirable when we see how she tries to frame a dramatic event as a television adventure, not missing any opportunity for more substantial material. The creators cast Manuela Velasco in this role, an actress but also a real television presenter, which makes her know how to win over the audience’s sympathy (which is not hindered, but rather helped by her girlish beauty), while at the same time making her pursuit of sensation more credible.

And even when an ordinary call turns into a bloody, terrifying experience, Angela does not lose her composure, adapts to the situation, and tries to report the event with its proper intensity, like a seasoned reporter. But she is a somewhat illusory protagonist. If we look at her more closely as a character in a drama, it turns out that Angela is completely unnecessary for the plot – her presence in the tenement building where the action takes place changes nothing; when she is not speaking to the camera, she is practically absent, and when attacks from infected residents occur, the woman is almost never in the foreground, rarely being in direct danger.

The truth is that Angela is in this work mainly to remind us that we are watching a film. To intrusively enter the frame and speak directly to the camera, that is, in fact, to us. There is something perverse, but also brilliant, in the fact that creators of found footage, in order to strengthen the illusion of truth, must constantly expose it. And [REC] is masterful in this respect – from the first frames it imitates a television broadcast, transforming into a hot report from a quarantined location and almost until the very end not allowing Angela to become anything more than a person reporting terrifying events. Her narrative passivity is nothing compared to the function she fulfills as the one thanks to whom we see everything. In other words – without her there would be no film.

Balagueró and Plaza frame within this quasi-document a horror about an infection that turns people into mindless zombies, saturating their work with a frenzied energy so unlike the rest of Spanish horror cinema (perhaps with the exception of the work of Álex de la Iglesia). Here too the form seems to impose the pace, shape, and dynamism of the macabre spectacle – the constantly moving camera reacts to the general chaos of the situation, but never loses what is most important in the frame (or outside it).

Even when the entire image shakes, suggesting that the cameraman is running, or when the long shot becomes more interesting to him than the closer one, even though we can hardly see anything there, we have full awareness of the creators’ control over the material; the two directors can even justify seemingly sloppy or chaotic shots as an attempt to make the message more credible, while at the same time telling their story in an extremely clear way.

It contains familiar genre elements, such as characters trapped in one place, panic leading to conflicts and outbursts of aggression, a sick child, supposedly only having a cold but posing an obvious threat – all of this most closely resembles Night of the Living Dead, but the more people die and the more monsters appear, the more lively and loud the horror becomes. At a certain point, the action does not stop for a moment, bringing to mind the original The Evil Dead. This association is also confirmed by the final recording on a tape recorder, which explains the cause of the tragedy, just as it did in the famous debut of Sam Raimi.

[REC] was the first in a whole series of Spanish horror films about a mysterious epidemic and the fight against the infected, but only in this one film did its creators manage to make the found footage convention an element necessary for the success of the entire undertaking. The report form, however, ends at the moment when there is no one left to film except those responsible for filming; then Balagueró and Plaza also remember that Spanish horror feeds on religious motifs and gaunt figures with a ghostly appearance.

We still observe everything through the eye of the camera, but Angela is forced to abandon the safe role of the one who merely reports and become the actual protagonist of her material. Perhaps she should have said then that it was the end of recording, if only to save the battery, so necessary when the light goes out, but on the other hand all her effort so far would have gone to waste without an effective finale.

Her program is called While You Sleep, although after an episode with firefighters one should not expect anyone to be able to fall asleep.