Terrified (2017)

Original title: Aterrados

Three houses in the same suburban street are hit by strange and disturbing events that end in more than just one death, as well as what looks a lot like the corpse of a child digging itself out of his grave and walking back home. The policeman Funes, and his good friend Jano, a former pathologist who has turned into the sort of paranormal investigator purposefully good at burying the terrible stuff, and the team of “specialist” Dr Allbreck and her colleague Dr Rosentok are involved in investigations of separate of these incidents, only to realize they might just be looking into the same series of events from different angles. I’d love to tell you which actor is playing whom here, but the absence of a proper cast and character list online in combination with my general lack of knowledge about more than a handful of Argentinean films and actors makes that impossible.

Anyway, when the characters team up and spend quality night time in the houses where all the strange stuff has been happening, events quickly get out of control completely.

I rather liked director Demián Rugna’s The Last Gateway from 2007. Like the earlier movie, Aterrados is a film very much in the spirit of the Weird and the strange, yet where Gateway sometimes felt amateurish and random (that’s not necessarily a bad thing), Terrified’s older Rugna has full control about the world of the strange and the grotesque he creates here. Watching the film, I still found myself sometimes reminded of Fulci-style cosmic Italian horror (though with far fewer gore effects than the maestro would have included) with its dominating mood of the irrational. However, the Fulci-esque elements have turned into small nods included in a more personal approach to cosmic horror.

And cosmic horror Terrified’s tale of a dimensional rift right in suburbia absolutely is, even if it at first seems to be a more conventional bit of supernatural horror with comparatively conventional, though well realized, shock sequences (at least if you find the idea of a creepy, naked, long-limbed man living and not living under a guy’s bed conventional). That, as it turns out, is the director biding his time until the final act turns towards the kind of strange that reminds even more of Junji Ito’s grotesque cosmicism than of Fulci – a huge compliment, even though I do love Fulci much more than the next guy. Rugna plays an interesting structural trick: the film’s first half, when you still expect a more conventional horror piece, is actually less conventionally structured, non-linearly moving around the plot’s timeline in a way that in hindsight is a spiral movement towards its core. Once the true cosmic grotesquerie starts, the film’s narrative becomes unexpectedly linear. You’d expect it to work the other way around, of course, but Rugna’s control about the Weird stuff – which I don’t want to spoil for those having the luck of going into the film for the first time – is so great the final act is strange enough it doesn’t need added formal strangeness to work how it is supposed to. This structure is also a wonderful way to play with the audience’s expectations, keeping the viewer confused early on until she gets the increasingly disturbing picture of what’s really going on.

Technically, Terrified is a fine film too, featuring camera work whose angles and movements are only ever subtly wrong and some wonderfully “haunted” suburban homes that become stranger in ways a viewer might only notice subconsciously. The only element of the film that doesn’t always quite come together as well as it could are the special effects – while everything is conceptually very strong stuff, sometimes the effects look a bit too much like effects; there are, on the other hand, some very strong moments there too, like the short glimpse of Allbreck’s fate (that’s as wonderfully Ito as things can get).


All this together add up to a film I find very special indeed, at least from the perspective of the friend of cosmic horror on screen. And which right minded person isn’t one?