[REC] + Quarantine

The zombie is ground zero for low budget horror filmmaking. It is the most democratic of monsters, the movie equivalent of punk rock. Anyone can learn two chords and add food coloring to Karo syrup and recruit some neighbors (everyone, absolutely everyone, wants to play a zombie) and make a decent dead pic. You don't even need a script! A zombie uprising writes itself.

Zed is therefore a natural ally of the populist (or faux populist, since the big-budget Cloverfield) microgenre pioneered by The Blair Witch Project — a movie that continues to grow in stature with hindsight. We now know that the Blair Witch crew were exactly eight years ahead of their time. Not until 2007, when every schlump on the street was toting a digital video widget, did the handheld docu-horror flick finally catch on. Three such innovators premiered that autumn, two of them thick with zombies. The third was Paranormal Activity.

That season also saw the release of Super Mario Galaxy for the Wii. What delight to discover that revolutionary gameplay had come not from a rogue upstart, as you might expect, but from the most venerable franchise in platformers! It's nice to have your trust reaffirmed. Likewise one of the aforementioned zombie docs was Diary of the Dead, the fifth volume in George Romero's flagship Dead series, a forty-year-old franchise still under original management and still breaking new ground.

The other undead innovator, however, was a rogue upstart. From Spain, of all places. I know Spain has produced a few high profile horror movies recently (The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth from Guillermo del Toro, and The Orphanage from some other hombre) but the country doesn't really have a well-identified horror tradition like, say, Italy. But all people of all nations are welcome to participate in the ongoing zombie apocalypse. So anyway, the title of this película de terror is [REC] — more of a glyph, really — as in "recording", as if to scream avant-garde. The almost-real-time running documentary approach is kind of novel, but the only truly mind-blowing aspect of this otherwise standard outbreak story is the rapid response time of law enforcement and public health officials: someone calls the cops when this old lady goes berserk in her apartment, and within like ten minutes the city has quarantined the building with a SWAT team and biohazard gear. This is absolutely unprecedented foresight on the part of municipal authorities in dealing with the sudden appearance of the living dead. Evidently the Spanish have much greater faith in the competence of their public servants.

An American remake was released one year later (again, rapid response time!), more sensibly titled Quarantine. I find myself recommending both versions. The Spanish original is better cast, with more naturalistic-looking actors; the American actors look like typecast character actors, which is what they are, spoiling the realism. But sometimes technical chops make all the difference. The higher-budgeted Quarantine is tighter, faster, more intense, with convincing gore and more brutal kills. Basically what you expect from the good ol' USA.