Well, it's back to the usual grind of un-life for Efrit and I, and that means just a horror movie twice a week instead of 19 in a weekend. We'll miss Telluride Horror Show until this time next year...Thanks again, THS, for another awesome year!
Terrified follows a team of investigators from various backgrounds that attempt to solve a series of mysterious crimes and happenings isolated in a few homes in a quiet neighborhood. Splitting up to investigate each home over the course of a night, things quickly escalate and it becomes very clear these incidents are not only linked, but supernatural.
Terrified, currently on Shudder and presented at this past Telluride Horror Show, was one of the scariest horror movies we've seen in a while. The scares are there. The tension is there. It has it all, and perhaps most refreshingly, it is constant throughout the film.
Made in Argentina, the language and culture barrier doesn't feel as prominent or distracting as it can be from other countries. It's easy for things to be lost in translation and context, but for the most part, Terrified is so busy establishing an unsettling atmosphere and scaring the crap out of the audience, you don't notice if everything isn't falling perfectly into place.
But still, I would argue that a story like this isn't intending to give everything away. There isn't a perfect explanation. We get clues, we get tidbits of information, particularly from two of the investigators, but it makes a lot of sense that we as an audience are just as lost to the inner workings of these supernatural happenings as the cast. Some characters have some knowledge, and we get a collaboration of all of it as the audience, but it doesn't answer everything, and I'm more than okay with that.
The scares are unrelenting, especially in the sense that the atmosphere is fantastically present throughout. The entities are very well done and, for a lack of a better word, terrifying. The effects work is well done and rarely unbelievable. The actors hold their own amidst the chaos. The story is serviceable and does its job of delivering the scares without inducing eye rolls.
I'd love to see more based in this universe, and perhaps more from Argentina if they can offer more like this!
Horror Rating System
Horror Qualifier: 9/10
Horror Quality: 9/10
Film Quality: 6/10
Be sure to check out our annual Halloween Horror Short Fest on Facebook, where we post a horror short on the regular the entire day of Halloween!