Demián Rugna’s Terrified begins with a woman, Clara, standing over the sink in her kitchen. She tries to make dinner. Every time she runs the faucet, she hears voices. Much later, her husband Juan comes home smiling. He tells a story about a dog that miraculously getting hit by a car. However, Clara seems hollow. Juan asks her what’s wrong and she tells him about the voices. She heard them say they were going to kill her.
Later that night Clara gets up to use the bathroom. Juan wakes up to loud banging. Is it from their neighbor Walter, someone who recently began to constantly remodel his home? He goes outside to yell at the man. He knocks. No one comes to the door. He buzzes Walter’s home but only gets static for an answer. When he returns home he realizes the banging is coming from his bathroom. He opens the door to see Clara’s bloody, lifeless form hang in the air. An invisible force repeatedly smashes her into the walls. He can do nothing but scream.
Hailing from Argentina, Terrified is a fresh take on the haunted house story. It doesn’t totally renovate the haunted house film but it certainly adds new rooms to the genre. Rather than just having a haunted house, writer and director Demián Rugna creates a whole haunted neighborhood. The film takes inspiration from other haunted house movies and builds on those foundations. Rugna knows how to construct a movie filled with atmosphere and jump scares that only add to that. For most of its ninety minutes, Terrified doesn’t hold your attention. It paralyzes you into witnessing the horror taking place on this neighborhood block.
There’s elements of Terrified that feel very familiar. So much of this seems like an extended riff on Steven Spielberg and Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist. As Poltergeist takes place in a suburb of California, this takes place in a suburb of Buenos Aires. Putting haunted house in a space with other houses instead of in an isolated space always lends the possibility of the terror reaching other homes. In Terrified, the haunting becomes a black mold infecting other houses silently and unseen. It starts at one house and reaches out to the surrounding ones. In this way, Terrified draws from Japanese horror films like Ju-On or Ringu. Yeah, a haunted house is scary but a haunted house that spreads into other homes? By the time a team of investigators shows up, the neighborhood already rotted from this otherworldly force.
Borrowing familiar haunts wouldn’t be scary if Demián Rugna didn’t bring his own touches to the film and he does. Rugna is a filmmaker who favors stillness over bombast. Consider the opening sequence with the death of Clara. She doesn’t thrash or struggle in the bathroom. She hangs in the air and moves back forth as if she’s a side of beef. The energy of the scene all comes her husband screaming as he’s unable to process the sight before him. The entities he creates here don’t skitter and howl. These creatures perch and whisper. They crawl through liminal spaces. They’re in the frame and then they’re not. Rugna fully understands we’re most afraid of the things we see out of the corner of our eyes.
The biggest strength of Terrified is its structure. The film is practically a one man anthology. We move through back and forth through time to learn the stories of various residents. It makes these hauntings feel like neighborhood gossip. These neighbors all know each other. Everyone knows that the one cop slept with the single mom or the spat between Juan and his neighbor. These hauntings aren’t dark secrets come to light or vengeful curses. The entities that plague these people simply coexists with them.
Once the film investigates the haunting and comes to a possible cause, Terrified runs out of steam. The movie works better in the shadows and hypotheticals. That’s fine though. By the end of Terrified, audiences witnessed enough horrifying imagery and dread. It’s a horror film that understands that it’s the quiet things lurking in the dark that scare us.
Cinema Dual 
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