Terrified (Aterrados) - Movie Review
What do you get when you combine elements from Uzumaki, The Haunting, and Invasion of the BodySnatchers and drop them all into modern day Argentina?
Another home run for Shudder, that’s what.
Don’t believe me?
Alright Tough guy…
Let’s Discuss.
Terrified is the US title for a film called Aterrados out of Argentina. Is is a Cosmic Horror / Haunted House / Body Horror film brought to us by the visionary writer / director Demian Rugna. Who, for a guy who has 11 credits total as a director (10 of which I’ve never heard of), crafted a solid film out of what could have been a mediocre vignette picture similar to V/H/S or The ABC’s of Death.
The film is shot in a fantastic vintage style. The picture is slightly yellowed and the technology used by the investigators look straight out of a Guillermo Del Toro flick. It gives the film an off-putting, semi-Wes Anderson fell that makes everything feel that much more uncomfortable. Also, the creature designs are incredible. They really achieved something with the sleep demons, especially the practical effect. What could have come off as a cheap rubber suit comes off as a skin crawling visual spectacle.
Oh…
Now you’re intrigued?
Take my hand…
…The film centers on a neighborhood experiencing a string of violent peculiarities. Strange events are happening at night. The new neighbor has a sleep paralysis demon who seems to be escalating his M.O., The woman next door is murdered by unknown means, and a long dead child came home for snack time.
It’s crazy shit that really I don’t want to go into more detail about without disclosing something super serial.
spoilers***spoilers***spoilers
This movie felt like being hit in the chest with a sledgehammer. It starts with building an uncomfortable vibe from something simple like weird noises in the pipes and escalated to brutal violence within seconds. Then it slows things down to jump back in time and reveal how the next door neighbor had a whole other bag of cats to wrestle with. To some, it might seem like butter fingered editing, but is revealed as brilliance as the film carries forward. This disjointed storytelling along with an unreliable point of view adds not only to the world building of the film, but it sets an expectation that anything could happen at any time. This is a film in the rare club of revealing the central creature in the 1st act of the film and still sticking the landing. Like I said in the above summary, this film comes off as it may have originally been pitched as either a miniseries or film of vignettes like Twilight Zone the Movie. It would have worked okay, but that genre is so tired and bloated that so few films in it don’t get much play outside of rarities like the incredible XX or Scare Package. The way this film was put together, while jarring, is still centralized on the investigations of paranormal scientist Mora Albrecht and spirit medium Jano, or so you think.
Tricky Tricky
SERIOUSLY, THIS NEXT STUFF WILL RUIN THE FILM.
SKIP TO THE FINAL PARAGRAPH TO SEE THE WRAP UP, OR GO WATCH THE MOVIE.
The actual central point is the water supply of the neighborhood. If you watch the film a second time, you will watch anytime someone goes near a tap with a lot more scrutiny. As the inter dimension nightmare fuel that chases our protagonists throughout the film are actually telekinetic microscopic bodysnatchers that take humans and mutate them into super nightmare fuel beasts and can move unseen throughout our world and kill anyone who sees through their glamours. It’s wild. We see the dream demon haunting Walter, Walter sees the dream demon hunting Walter, bit both of us are wrong. There is no dream demon. Just as there is psychic force murdering Juan’s wife Clara.
Dr. Albrecht (played by the perfectly cast Elvira Onetto) tells the helpless Comisario Funes (played masterfully by Maximiliano Ghione) to not trust anything he sees that night. She says it again and again. It makes no sense in context to the film up to that point. The film goes to great lengths to confirm everything that’s happening is scientifically true. There’s video evidence of Walter’s dream demon, they’ve got the reanimated corpse of Alicia’s son locked in the freezer, and let’s not forget the gigantic hole in reality right in the middle of Juan’s living room wall.
It’s all a lie.
No, I’m not pulling your chain.
Think about it pal, Dr. Albrecht says don’t trust your eyes after quickly mentioning that these creatures are microscopic and then exclaiming to not drink or come into contact with the tap water.
Unfortunately, by this point the majority of group has already had a drink, washed their hands, or been splashed with the tainted liquid. Everything that’s happening is a bad trip. Walter experiences hallucinations of a sleep demon, hallucinations which he infects Dr. Albrecht by calling her office all day every day for weeks on end. By the time he sends the video of the monster haunting him, Dr. Albrecht is so desperate for proof of the supernatural that she sees the demon in her own way in the film and pictures. Jano left the police force in disgrace after telling a victim’s child that the dead man fingered him as a murderer. His spirit medium powers are considered a hoax and his book flopped on the charts. Albrecht jokes about this fact in a very subtle fashion at their first meeting. It seems like a throwaway snub, but what it’s telling us as the audience is that Jano is equally as desperate for win as Albrecht and together with the unhinged cryptozoologist, Rosenstock, infect Funes with the concept they hope to prove. They psych him out again and again, exposing him to violence and horror until he snaps.
Rosenstock stabs the knife into his own hand, Jano stabbed his eyes with the glass, Alicia kills herself, and Albrecht breaks her own neck. We see these things happen frame by the paranoia and forced perception of sad, desperate people. Terrified by the incredible hype built up by this group of weirdos, Funes snaps. Unfortunately for us, Funes is our point of view. His over medicated, heart problem, deafened perception is overwhelmed by the insanity of the group psychosis.
The simplest answer is most often the truth.
The water was corrupted. It caused people to hurt themselves in the throws of hallucinations. The pipes are old, most likely contain led. The neighborhood’s infrastructural decrepitude due to governmental corruption and ineptitude is the real monster here.
Of course, that’s just my opinion.
It’s also the most often skeptical interpretation of the H.P. Lovecraft tale The Colour Out of Space that I’ve heard argued in recent years. It’s a fun argument, but it’s a limp banana.
Environmental contamination is a modern threat.
Lovecraft wrote his story in 1927. That’s seven years before the death of Marie Curie and parallel to the events surrounding the Radium Girls. Even then, these exposures to radiation were so isolated and news so siloed that it’s believable that Lovecraft may not have heard of either of these incidents. Radiation contamination really didn’t come into the public vernacular until after WWII. Even then, it didn’t really get fully detailed in world media until the events in Chernobyl decades later.
In the case of this film, MY opinion is that the water is contaminated and causing people to commit uncharacteristic actions including self harm. As Argentina is one of many countries that has experienced the mystifying appearance of Dancing Sickness, I feel like that may be the originating idea.
Of Course this is my opinion. When you watch the movie, you might see shades of Hastur or Cthulhu. That’s the great thing about art, it’s up to interpretation.
Watch this movie is you like mind bending, intense jump scare having, investigation films. This film could sit right beside fun flicks like Identity, Troll Hunter, and Intacto. If you like any of these films, you’ll enjoy Terrified.
Terrified is streaming exclusively on SHUDDER.
