Terrified (2017)
Directed by Demian Rugna
Viewed on Shudder
Summary: Abundant scares and quick pacing make this Argentinian horror instantly accessible to all horror fans, even though it is a bit uneven.
I try to watch as much foreign horror as I can. There are so many great movies out there that I just haven’t seen because not all f them are dubbed/subtitled or even get distribution where I live, so when I’m able to see a movie from a country I’ve never seen one from before, I get pretty excited! I had just that opportunity today with the movie Terrified, a horror film from Argentina that I’ve heard quite a few good things about! And I should watch this before the American remake comes out… I would normally not be thrilled about such a new movie getting remade, but this remake is being produced by a filmmaker I love, Guillermo Del Toro, so bring it on! Woah, got really off track there. On to Terrified!
Terrified takes place in a, usually, quiet suburban town that is currently being affected by some strange supernatural events. No, that isn’t a spoiler, Terrified is incredibly upfront with all the bizarre, freaky, and strange plot points that happen, so it is not spoiling anything to say that’s something strange in the neighborhood. The bulk of the story follows several investigators of the paranormal variety who make it their mission to determine what is going on to see if there is a way that they could understand it and maybe stop it. A series of frightening events follows.
That plot summary was much vaguer than I usually make them and a big part of that is that Terrified is much less story driven than it is character driven and it would be difficult to explain what the story is without getting into who each individual character is and what their role is in what happens. That’s not to say there is no story, there is a story and I quite liked where it eventually ended up going, but that is something that I don’t want to spoil for anyone, because where Terrified did not go where I thought it was going, at all, either in terms of story or in terms of character development.
I’ve danced around the movie enough, time to talk about what I am actually going to discuss, whether or not the movie lives up to its name, and I can say with some confidence that it does! As I mentioned before, Terrified is not a subtle movie and what I meant is that it comes at you hard and fast with fistfuls of frightening concepts, imagery, and situations, basically as soon as the first scene starts. The very first scene in the movie features a woman tidying up around the kitchen sink until she hears an odd noise from the drain. There’s this soft banging, whistling, almost moaning type sound and it is a very effective way of telling the audience everything they need to know about the movie, which is that 1) the scares are going to start immediately and then not stop and 2) That sound is a big part of what the horror moments will be.
Like a lot of great horror movies, sound is used incredibly well here, going a bit beyond the normal, “music sting that accompanies a jump scare,” use, although there are quite a few jump scares here. The score is ominous and oppressive and almost seems to be a monster of its own, stalking and terrorizing the people with gleeful abandon. Along with this clever use of sound, there are monsters, of a sort, who show up with some regularity and let me tell you, these things are the stuff of nightmares. Very rarely have I seen so many genuinely creepy monster designs in one movie and that is where Terrified really shines, telling us that there are things that go bump in the night and then showing us exactly what those horrible things are.
Unfortunately, I can’t call Terrified completely successful. Although I liked where the story eventually went, I was not a fan of the narrative structure that it used to get there. The narrative switches gears multiple times in the first act, first focusing on a couple living in that home with the moaning pipes, then it flashes back to the experiences that the neighbor had dealing with similar problems, before settling on another group of characters to focus on for the last hour or so.
Individually, I liked all of these stories and I don’t have much of a problem with their connection, but it felt like there should have been more meat to the first two stories to avoid them feeling tacked on, or maybe the main storyline should have been more of the focus, allowing those characters and that storyline to be a bit better developed. The way it is, Terrified is kind of split between these two ideas and it made the movie a little disjointed for me, especially because there are a lot of character dynamics between the groups in the second half and they weren’t always particularly well explained so some more time to establish who was who and how everyone related to each other would have been helpful.
I don’t know if I can fully blame that on the movie though, because I think there may have been some translation issues that confused me a bit. I don’t know very much Spanish, but I was able to pick out a couple phrases used that were translated a little bit off and I wonder how much of the subtleties of the character dynamics were lost in translation? Alternatively, everything was laid out fine and I just wasn’t paying enough attention. That’s equally likely, I think.
Getting back into the good though, Terrified was, for the most part, paced very well. To go along with the upfront nature of the scares, Terrified moves at a steady pace, almost a little too quickly at times, going from scare to scare and keeping the stakes high. It’s such an interesting change from how slow and deliberate I usually like my horror paced that it kind of works for me, even if there are a few scenes that kind of slow things down at around the midpoint. While I liked the pacing, for the most part, there were some moments near the end of the movie that I was getting a little exhausted with how many things were happening and how quickly they were happening. If the pacing had been slowed a little then it might have let a little more atmosphere build for the final scenes, which as they are, are good, but they’re mostly just the same kinds of scenes that we’d seen earlier. Still, it’s not a huge problem.
Earlier I mentioned that Guillermo Del Toro is producing the remake of Terrified and I could not pick anyone better to help adapt this for an American audience. Now, I know that producers may not have the same direct power as a writer or director, but Rugna would be a fool to not pick GDT’s brain for ideas on upgrading his already good film. Overall, Terrified has a lot going for it but is a little light on elements that make horror really stick with me. It certainly isn’t a bad movie, though, and I would definitely recommend it to anyone looking for a fast-paced, creepy, monster mash, that is a hell of a ride.
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