#32 "[Rec]" (2007)

Is it too much to hope that someday, perhaps someday soon, horror filmmakers will stop finding "found footage" footage?

Oh yes, it most certainly is - and it's all down to supply and demand. So, like a bad Reagonomics pundit, let's start with the supply side first...

Horror films have always been cheap to make. Not that all of them are low-budget of course, but it's almost unique as a genre in that its audiences do not demand - and do not even necessarily want - high-production values, technical brilliance or name actors. And as the cost of independent film-making has gotten lower and lower over time, it's been easier and easier to crank out horror flicks with only a location, a cast of aspiring (read: dirt cheap) actors and a modest budget for special effects make-up.

Found footage films take the DIY ethos of the classic '80's slasher movies and run with it, making films like "Friday the 13th" and "My Bloody Valentine" look like "Gone with the Wind" in their production values. Needing little to no crew, a tiny cast, no more equipment than a camcorder and an Arri light kit and very little time, a film like "Paranormal Activity" can be made for $15,000 and (with some digital tidying and an admittedly hefty publicity budget) take in gross theatrical receipts of almost 10,000 times that much (or about 1,000,000% of the production budget). And that's before DVD, Blu-Ray, on-demand, basic cable, merchandizing and - of course - franchising. Forget Apple or Exxon Mobil - if you want to look at mind-bending bang for your production buck, the smart money's in found footage.

Of course, anybody can make a low-to-no-budget feature film these days (really, anybody) and can spend $15,000 on a film that exists only on its Director's hard-drive. The second part of the profit equation is obviously demand - and that's where the audience comes in. It's easy to see why Producers make found footage films, but even the cheapest film needs to compete for time and space with other movies on store shelves, theater screens, even iTunes and Amazon product line-ups. So why all the demand?

That's a harder and much more interesting question to answer and one that may only become clearer once more time has passed. Horror films are the nightmares of their times and, just like any dream worth its time on the couch, they often reveal things about our culture and ourselves things that we might not want to otherwise face. 'Torture porn' like "Saw" and "Hostel" (and their many, many sequels and imitators and imitators' sequels) were all the rage from 2004 until around 2009. Essentially torture porn took off when mainstream Americans heard of Abu Ghraib and started to realize just quite how much torture their government was committing in their name - and then came crashing down in popularity after the election of a determinedly anti-torture President. Sure there are still hold-overs like "The Collection" that try to re-capture the glory-days of graphic, voyeuristic sadism, but over all that kind of horror has moved back to the extreme.

We now live in an era in which there are cameras everywhere, they've become smaller and cheaper than ever and they're recording all the time - to the point where we often forget about them in the moment. We've gotten used to 'filming' ourselves and our friends and to documenting even the minutest details of our lives. And the monster in the closet no longer looks like abduction by mysterious, faceless captors who will torture us for their amusement (and maybe for our own sins - like being complicit in the torture of others...). The fears are a lot closer to home - indeed they come from our homes, from our daily lives, from our relationships with those closest to us.

"The Blair Witch Project" was a huge success back in 1999, but what really strikes me is how little successful imitation followed it at that time. It wasn't until 2007 / 2008 that the genre exploded and has become the phenomenon it - for better and for much, much worse - it now is. With the end of the Bush administration in sight, America fell head-over-horrified-heels for "Paranormal Activity" and "Cloverfield" (both movies I really enjoyed myself). If "Saw" was the horror franchise for the Bush era, seemingly unstoppable every single Halloween, "Paranormal Activity" has become the post-Great-Recession franchise for the age of Obama.

But in the same way that Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace came out with their theories of evolution at practically the same time with little mutual contact, on the other side of the pond a little film called "[Rec]" was getting the kind of buzz "Paranormal Activity" was in the States. And like "Paranormal Activity," "[Rec]"'s success would kick off its own mini-franchise with 2 sequels out and another on its way later this year.

"[Rec]" starts off nicely by introducing us to reporter Angela immediately (no credits to distract us or remind us that what we're seeing is fiction) who is having trouble keeping a straight face and remembering her lines as her cameraman Pablo records the open to her 'human interest' segment on the night-time lives of local firefighters. What follows really does look like the kind of unedited footage a segment editor for a local news channel might receive filled with the kind of staged interviews you would expect as well as Angela's little asides to Pablo immediately before and after the 'real material' is being shot.

The firefighters we meet are likeable and so is Angela in her kind of bratty way - even with her obvious boredom with the material she and Pablo are shooting, she stays game and does her best to bring some life to the proceedings. That boredom goes away as soon as the fire alarm she's been all but praying for comes and she goes for a 'ride along' with the firefighters to an apartment building in which an old lady seems to be trapped in her room. Then, of course, things quickly get weirder and more dangerous and her tame 'filler' piece turns out to be the story of the decade - if only she and Pablo can get the tapes (and themselves) back out of the building in one piece.

Honestly, writing about "[Rec]" after watching it for the first time 7 years after its release seems a little unfair. Moments that are now cliches were a lot fresher at the time. A good example is the inevitable justification for keeping the camera rolling ("People have to know the truth!") when surely any sane person would just be cowering somewhere or running for their lives. This line is now such a well-worn plot crutch that it's nicely parodied by "Psych"'s own found footage episode ("Lassie Jerky"), but it wasn't at the time and it actually does make sense given that Angela is a reporter - and one hungry for her 'big break,' at that.

As it is, despite some drag in the middle of the film, "[Rec]" does what it sets out to do and does some smart things with its central idea. At one point, locked out of the room where the 'contaminated' firefighter and policeman are being held, Pablo stands on a table shooting through a cracked window to avoid being seen. When the 'treatment' suddenly turns into a violent attack, we want to see more to understand what is happening, but the suspense and shock we feel are increased by the fact that our vision is limited to what Pablo's camera can catch.

The very ending is also effective, played out through the green night vision of the camera as this is the only way to see in the dark with the onboard light broken and a hostile presence stalking nearby our protagonists. The impact of this hunt in the dark is undermined, though, by a scene of ham-fisted exposition right before that involves a conveniently cued-up tape for Angela to discover and play that 'explains everything' (or at least way too much).

It's the kind of exposition that would be fine in an adventure video game, where we expect there to be lulls in the action and accept that there will be audio-logs and written messages for us to discover - but in a film, it's bad narrative technique and bad horror. So much of the real fear in horror comes when we don't know why the killer is murdering his victims, why the dead have suddenly come back to life with a taste for... us or who the Blair Witch actually was or is and why the hell is Josh standing in that weird way against the wall?

"[Rec]" isn't the horror masterpiece it was hyped as in horror circles before its release in the US and its impact is considerably lessened by everything that's come since. Nevertheless, it's still a well thought-out, at times very effective horror film that - unlike the found footage genre itself - doesn't outstay its welcome.