Sitges Film Festival 2009: Paranormal Activity, [REC] 2, The Descent 2

Once more into the breach, horror fans! This year’s Festival Internacional de Cinema Fantàstic in Sitges, a charming coastal resort town a half-hour south of Barcelona, was the jump-scare capital of the world for the first half of October. The 42nd annual fest is a whirring vertiginous hypno-wheel of psycho-head blowouts, paranormal activity, zombie-stomping and dangerous visions—and not all of them are entirely confined to the screen.

As such, the festival offers an unusually broad spectrum of scary movies—usually playing to packed houses even after midnight—which makes it easier to measure their shriek-making effectiveness. Gala opening night feature [REC] 2 (pictured above), a sequel to the festival smash of 2007, was embraced as a winner by favorite sons, directors Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza. Remade in the United States as last year’s Quarantine, the original was just ahead of the latest curve of handheld shockers boasting a zombie theme. The initial [REC] was cleverly shot from the strict point-of-view of a documentary news team trapped inside a Barcelona apartment building where some mysterious virus has turned the occupants into screeching, bloodthirsty monstrosities.

The filmmakers calibrated a thrilling plunge into murky terror by first playing off a kind of joke: A spokesmodel-style TV reporter (Manuela Velasco) who gets in way over her head in a bid for muckraking cred, realizing far too late that she’s up shit creek with only a handicam. The film’s sharply executed Old Dark House maneuvers set up a mood of ever-pervading dread. A final discovery is made, hinting at a case of demon possession and a biological experiment gone horribly wrong. And then: Curtains. The sequel makes its Exorcist underpinnings explicit, as a priest enters the sealed-off site with a pair of Hazmat dudes on a secret mission. The hoodoo unfolds, dissipating much of the uncanny aura that made the original [REC] so gripping. But Balagueró and Plaza have such a sure handle on their technique that even as the story turns into a standard religio-horror demon chaser saga, they can still manage to scare the living piss out of an audience.

Same goes for The Descent 2. British director Neil Marshall’s original 2005 cave-crawling adventure turned an outing by a posse of women friends into a feeding frenzy for a species of subterranean mutants, all the while triggering a battery of shocks as the explorers twisted and squirmed their way through a perilous network of tunnels and rock formations. The film’s deeper themes of jealousy and maternal loss resonated with the womb-like confines, with dream sequences abruptly broken by the deadly intrusions of the creatures. The film’s separate endings left Shauna Macdonald’s Sarah as the lone survivor, a cruel joke of a sort as the cave trip was meant in part as a way to shake her loose from the death of her daughter in a car accident. Instead, she’s become even more demented, having gone primal and become a bit of a mutant herself (and wounding the escapade’s leader/villain, Juno, in a fit of rage that presumably rendered her a midnight snack for the flesh-starved amphibian goonies). In the US version, Sarah escapes the cave, though not without some stock “gotchas.” In the UK version, it’s all part of a final fantasy, in which she imagines a reunion with her lost daughter deep in the dank, dripping darkness.

The sequel, directed by Jon Harris (who edited both Descents), loses the greater element of surprise as, in one of those it-only-happens-in-horror-movies moments, a hospitalized Sarah is dragged out of ICU by a gung-ho local sheriff hellbent on finding the remains of her party. So, immediately, we know this: Everyone is going to get trapped. Again. And the creatures are going to eat them. Again. There will be a crucial act of female bonding, followed by the all-important shock ending (which, of course, hints at another sequel, since all these things come in threes). But, if I can use my new friend Stephanie Trepanier, who runs Montreal distributor Evokative Films, as a barometer, none of this knowledge actually reaches your nervous system in any fright-suppressing manner. Stephanie was flying out of her seat like grease on a griddle. Good thing the reclining chairs at the festival’s plush 1200-seat auditorium are well-cushioned. Even if I felt that D2 was a case of diminishing returns, Marshall’s template is effective enough to sustain a faithful re-run. My fearless pal and I tried again the next day with Paranormal Activity. I’d been unable to get into sold-out screenings for the buzz-movie-du-jour at Austin’s Fantastic Fest, so my expectations were high. Pffft! This wanna-be indulgence in Blair Witchcraft was a waste of time: Like being stuck for 90 minutes with one of those miserable couples that request an intervention from Dr. Phil. Plus a demonic presence whose splashiest trick arrives (after what feels like a year) as a kind of ultimate PMS joke. Stephanie barely stirred.