
Good evening, horror fans. This Tuesday night's feature film for #RosesPoolsideDriveIn is [REC], directed by Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza, and released in 2007. The premise is deceptively simple: a television reporter and her cameraman accompany a group of firefighters on a routine call to an apartment building in Barcelona. What begins as an ordinary piece of local reporting rapidly becomes something rather more complicated, and the occupants discover that leaving the building is no longer quite as straightforward as they might have hoped. [REC] is a found-footage horror film, but its real strength lies in how effectively it weaponizes the limitations of that format. You are stuck with the camera, stuck with the characters, and—rather unfortunately—stuck inside the building. Information is scarce, visibility is worse, and everyone involved has considerably less time to understand what is happening than would be ideal. It is tense, claustrophobic, and remarkably uninterested in allowing the audience a comfortable vantage point from which to observe the horror. There is no convenient orchestral swell informing you that something terrible is about to happen. Sometimes there is barely enough light to determine what you are looking at in the first place. So please keep your eyes on the screen. Preferably both of them. Unquirk for content warnings.


