It’s hard to remember a time when the Paranormal Activity franchise wasn’t a household name, and many horror fans have long lost their taste for the series. Definitely check out the original first and foremost for at least one example of foreign films executed much better than their eventual American remakes. The remake – under the international title Quarantine – is famous for nixing the entire twist ending and stars Jennifer Carpenter as the lead reporter who rushes into an apartment building with her cameraman, hoping to catch a newsworthy story. One of the many Spanish horror films to be remade for an American audience, REC is still passed around by fans committed to having the original stand as the preferred telling of the story. Not everything is what it seems, and the third act moves things completely out of predictability. Known for creating an intensely claustrophobic atmosphere, the real star of the movie is its twist on the whole viral/rabies/zombie infection concept. The film was a major hit with critics from the start and had an unusually successful film festival run before getting a wider release. Shot in Barcelona, Spain, and released in 2007, REC shows what the genre is capable of in the right hands, those hands being extremely talented directors Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza. This has lead to some incredibly bad and surprisingly good movies over the past seventeen years as studios try to recreate the phenomenon that this film started right before the turn of the century. The Blair Witch Project is one of the first films to show studios that they can make an extremely effective horror movie for next to nothing and open huge to a wanting audience. The movie was shown at the Sundance Film Festival that year and almost immediately bought by Artisan for a reported $1.1 million. They set out to combine the styles and create something new and did so on a shoestring budget of only $35,000. Directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez came up with the idea originally because they found that documentaries about the paranormal were sometimes much more frightening than recent horror films that had released and disappointed. This story structure would be copied by so many other films in the genre and is one of the reasons the producers set out to make this movie to begin with.
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