I come to the 2007 Spanish horror thriller [REC] very late, long after having seen the American remake, called Quarantine, beforehand. The fact that Quarantine received middling reviews and was quickly forgotten, while [REC] remains well-regarded and spawned a franchise of sequels, is an interesting case study of how even a close copy can fail to capture the spark of the original.

I haven’t watched Quarantine in nearly twenty years. My memory of it is that the story and style were nearly identical to what I just watched in [REC]. Yet the remake didn’t work for me at the time, while the original does work for me now, very much so. Is that just a factor of time and distance between watching them, or is one movie truly better than the other? Of could both be true?

Title:	[REC]
Also Known As:	[*REC] [Rec] Rec
Year of Release:	2007
Directors:	Jaume Balagueró Paco Plaza
Watched On:	Blu-ray
Also Available On:	Fawesome Various VOD rental and purchase platforms

[REC] is a zombie horror film told in found-footage style, viewed entirely from the first-person point of view of a television news cameraman, whose own face is never shown. (The title is obviously short for “Record.”) The heroine of the story is Ángela Vidal (Manuela Velasco), a young and bubbly reporter for a late night news magazine program called While You’re Asleep, the title of which begs one to question who could be watching.

On a particularly slow night, Ángela is assigned to visit a local fire station and profile the firefighters there, to see how they live in the station, what they eat, and how they spend their down time between emergencies. It’s not a very substantive or exciting story, but if she’s really lucky, maybe a fire will break out somewhere. Disappointingly, a firefighter explains that most of their calls wind up being mundane affairs like water main breaks or pet rescues.

To her relief, Ángela gets to tag along on a truck dispatched to assist an elderly lady trapped in her apartment. It may not be a fire, but it’s something. Upon arrival at the building, the situation is already in some disarray. A couple cops arrived first and most of the tenant neighbors are gathered in the lobby, concerned about the strange noises they’ve heard emanating from the apartment. The firefighters have to break down the woman’s door to help her and… well, I’ve already told you this is a zombie movie. You can see where it’s going, right?

Indeed, [REC] follows a lot of familiar tropes of the zombie genre. The building is quickly locked down and quarantined, isolating all the survivors to a single location they can’t escape, all the while getting picked off one by one and turned into the very monsters they fear. The zombies themselves fall into a sort of comfortable middle ground between George Romero’s lumbering corpses in the Living Dead series and the amped-up “Infected” of 28 Days Later. They’re fast and brutal, but don’t run in frenzied hordes. Victims turn relatively quickly, but not instantly within seconds of contact.

Looking at it critically, the film doesn’t bring much new or innovative to the zombie formula, beyond the found-footage gimmick, which was already starting to wear a little thin by the time the movie made its way to the American market in 2009, after the likes of Paranormal Activity and Cloverfield. At this writing, almost two decades later, zombie stories in general feel about as played-out as possible, leaving horror fans jaded at the prospect of watching another.

Somehow, despite that, [REC] works incredibly well. It’s both creepy and exciting. The jump-scares are smartly staged and genuinely shocking, and the movie has a handful of moments that should still inspire an “OH SHIT!” out of even the most cynical viewer.

Most importantly, the main character Ángela is very appealing and sympathetic. My memory is that her counterpart in the Quarantine remake was annoying and I wanted her to die. Perhaps that wasn’t fair, even at the time I felt it, but I have difficulty getting past that initial reaction. Judging by the aggregate scores at Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, it looks like many other critics and viewers had pretty similar opinions of it.

In comparison, this Ángela is the linchpin that holds [REC] together. As her motivations change from possible career advancement to simple self preservation, I rooted for her to beat the odds and make it through the night. That’s a critical factor that too many other horror films fail to achieve.

Due to timing issues and the need to prioritize its quickie remake, [REC] essentially went straight-to-DVD in the United States. However, it did very well in that video environment and grew into a cult item. Meanwhile, the movie was popular enough in its native Spain to generate three sequels. I haven’t seen them, but a little cursory research tells me that they retcon some plot points from this one, the idea of which doesn’t exactly excite me. Perhaps one movie is enough for me on this. Not everything needs to become a franchise.

The Blu-ray

[REC] took an awfully long time to hit Blu-ray in the American market. Although Sony released a DVD here in 2009, no Blu-ray followed until the title was passed off to Shout! Factory in 2018. I suspect someone at Sony thought DVD was good enough for a found-footage movie like this, even though it had been shot with HD cameras.

Back home in Spain, on the other hand, the movie first appeared on the format in 2008. According to my records, I felt it worthwhile enough to import that disc, probably in a plan to compare it against the American remake I’d been assigned to review, but never got around to doing that. I think I may have been so underwhelmed by the remake that I lost interest.

The Spanish home video market is notorious for being flooded with bootlegs, but the copy I have is a legitimate product released by official distributor Filmax Home Video and purchased from major retail chain Fnac.

All that said, the Blu-ray has a genuine high-definition appearance and more detail than would be visible on DVD, but the movie’s found-footage style limits how good it could (and even should) look on a technical level. Shot on prosumer camcorders, the image has a fair amount of sensor noise and other artifacts, especially during dark scenes, which of course comprise the majority of the runtime. That’s completely appropriate and not meant as a criticism. For its chosen aesthetic, the movie is quite visually interesting, with lighting that varies from bright and overlit to almost impenetrably dark, to some scenes shot in night-vision. The way zombies stay hidden in darkness until only briefly illuminated before and during jump-scares is really effective.

The picture is mildly letterboxed to 1.85:1. In this case, an argument could actually be made for opening it up to the camera sensor’s full 16:9, as any true found-footage recording would be watched, but the studio opted to present it in the theatrical aspect ratio instead. To my mind, either is valid.

Strangely, the original Castilian Spanish soundtrack is available in both Dolby Digital 5.1 and DTS 5.1 options on the same disc, but both only in the lossy compressed versions. I don’t think that matters terribly much. The DTS I watched has a high bit-rate and sounds pretty great, even if not technically lossless. The disc also has an English dub in DD 5.1 but I didn’t bother with it.

As someone who doesn’t speak Spanish beyond a few phrases, the English subtitle translation reads clearly and coherently enough. I’ll leave it for others to judge its accuracy.

The movie has a creative sound design comprised mostly of diegetic sounds that are meant to come from the camera’s microphone or the wireless mics most of the characters wear. Of course, the sound mixers cheat a bit with that by giving the track a fair amount of surround activity and deep bass. Scary noises can come from any direction. The sound of gunshots booming in the confined building hallways is really jolting. The movie has no musical score at all, just one song played over the end credits.

The eventual American Blu-ray one-ups the Spanish release by encoding the soundtrack in lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1, but I’m satisfied enough with this one that I’m not pining for an upgrade at the moment. Likewise, I assume that the audio commentary, making-of featurette, interviews, trailers, and so forth on the American disc must have English subtitles this one doesn’t. I wasn’t planning to watch those anyway.

Related

• Film from Z to A Article Index
• Quarantine (2008) – Original Blu-ray review from 2009