Macabre…ish Horror Review: Terrified aka Aterrados
Terrified aka Aterrados, 2017/ 1 hr 27 min.
A woman, Clara (Natalia Señorales), hears people speaking in her kitchen sink drain all afternoon and she’s afraid, she says she heard them say they were going to kill her.
Later that night, Juan (Augustin Rittano) hears noises in the walls too and he insists it’s the neighbor, Walter (Demián Salomón). But soon realizes it is definitely not him. He goes into the bathroom and the shower is on and Clara is bloodied and floating. She is being slammed, hard, into the shower walls, back and forth, over and over. He tries to stop it but he can’t.
Juan ends up being interrogated by Dr. Allbreck (Elvira Onetto) , Jano (Norbert Gonzalo) and Dr. Rosentok (George Lewis) and they believe him. They present eerily similar photos of another woman this has happened to, in 1998, in the US. They ask if anything strange happened in the neighborhood in the weeks preceding this event. The answer is yes and it happened to Walter and a neighborhood child.
The story is Walter was remodeling his house at odd hours and had an accident. What really happened is he was having paranormal events happening in his house and was seeing things. His furniture was moving around on their own and damaging the structure of his and his neighbor’s houses. And some kind of being was in his house. He was terrified and trying, unsuccessfully, to seek help. So Walter sets up a camera to get proof and he gets it.
A child is spooked from Walter’s yard and hit by a bus. An investigator, Jano, is sent by Funes (Maximilliano Ghione) to investigate the happenings on the street after the child who was hit by the bus turns up back home.
The child’s remains are seated at the table with breakfast in front of him. He is decomposed, dirty and his fingers look as if he could have dug himself out of a grave. And he does move, just when no one is looking.
Dr. Allbreck, at the same time is investigating and documenting Walter’s house. Plus no one’s seen him lately. The lead investigator, Funes, is trying to keep this undercover because the reality seems insane.
Plus Jano has experienced this twice before, once a man dead for a full two days, woke up and a 20 year old with 14 rounds in his head and on the autopsy table, opened his eyes and grabbed his arm, more than once. Jano explains all this to Dr. Allbreck.
The residents of the street give the team permission to stay in their homes and investigate and hopefully stop whatever is happening here.
They do not stop it, they rile it up and become victims to it. And now, this horror is beyond the bounds of this neighborhood.
This Argentine horror written and directed by Demián Rugna and is very well done. The pacing and build up was good. The effects were excellent, physical and CG. It is bloody, gory and sometimes grotesque. There are some good jump scares too. Great cinematography. This is like if Poultergeist was crossed with REC plus a dash of Pet Sematary. The physical effects range from Poultergeist to The Thing. This was well done.