Terrified (Demián Rugna, 2017)

Pure nightmare fuel

Strange, spooky shit is going down in a suburban Argentine neighborhood… Disembodied voices are coming from drains beneath kitchen sinks, literal monsters are crawling out from under beds, corpses are levitating, and the dead are digging themselves out of graves and returning home…

It’s pure, unrefined nightmare fuel.

Except these aren’t just nightmares. These impossible horrors are actually being suffered by people. The problem is, they’re utterly unequipped to deal with such terrors.

These things shouldn’t be happening! They shouldn’t exist! So how on earth do they cope with them?

In one house, the wife hearing voices down the sink simply refuses to go into her kitchen. In another, a man suffers sleepless nights as a result of the nude giant that lumbers around his bedroom each night.

Gradually, their sanity is eroded by the horrors they’re being forced to endure with no hope of escape. Nobody can help them. There’s nothing they can do to rid themselves of these nightmares made flesh.

They’re just continually worn down… Terrified…

Out of hope and with nowhere to turn, no-one to turn to, their lives are ruined, their worlds collapse… They just sink further and further into quiet depression, fear, hopelessness… The horrors persist, and will continue to persist, even after these current victims have been driven to madness, or death, or worse…

For that and many other reasons, Terrified (Aterrados in its native Spanish) is a genuinely scary film.

Perhaps it’s because the scares are so modestly plausible (the drain voice) or rooted in primal childhood fears (the creature under the bed), or maybe it’s because the special effects are so efficiently deployed and frequently shrouded in shadows (one obvious early doors scene aside) that they let the viewers’ own imagination do most of the heavy lifting.

Either way, Terrified succeeds in crafting an atmosphere of ominous dread which delivers several legitimate scares. Indeed, the film seems intent on making grown adults scared of the dark again. Mission accomplished.

I’m thinking most pointedly about the experiences of Walter, the character tormented each night by a naked man who wanders his bedroom and stands over him while he cowers beneath his sheets.

He struggles on, continues to report to work, but he’s clearly not getting any sleep. He’s been hunting for experts that might be able to help him and finally gets referred to the one specialist who might possibly be able to assist. He sets up a camera to try to prove that his paranormal encounters are real — but by the time she is convinced, he has disappeared without a trace.

A trio of supernatural investigators descend on the neighborhood and try to figure out what is going on and begin to investigate some spooky shenanigans firsthand. Creepiest of all: the monsters under the bed are always there, but they are only visible (and dangerous) in the dark.

Yeah, it’s scary!

An attempt to explain away all the malicious phenomenon doesn’t entirely work, nor does the downer door-left-ajar ending, but that really doesn’t matter. Terrified succeeds in delivering actually scary moments (an increasingly rare feat these days) that get trapped within your subconscious and which will haunt you for days.