2. Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza Terrify Their Cast With A Falling Corpse REC
To my mind, what makes REC such an effective horror film is that it takes a long time to get going. Youre following round actress Manuela Velasco as she presents something called While You Were Sleeping, which effectively revolves around her flouncing around a fire station documentary-style, and its a good twenty-odd minutes until you actually see a zombie. Even then, none of the actors are quite sure what she is, even if you that is, the viewer do. The excrement only truly hits the turbine (to go all Victorian English on it) when the firefighter sent to look after the woman who is on a high floor is sent tumbling into the lobby, where the residents of a block of flats are arguing about why theyve been sealed into the establishment. Its a hell of a shock for the viewer, but what you might not know is that it was also pretty damn traumatising for the actors too. Yes, nobody knew that a realistic mannequin was being dropped on them from several floors up, which makes directors Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza both evil geniuses and shockingly blasé about their casts safety. That reaction you see as a fireman makes a large noise on his way to becoming a pancake contains all the real shock of if you had actually seen a man plummet onto the tiles before your very eyes. To my mind, this is the sort of gambit which requires a lot of bravery and punch-able faces on the directors parts it happens so early in the film that theyve completely broken any sort of trust they had with an ensemble (which featured a little girl, by the way) that would surely be pissed off and suspicious all the way through the remainder of the shoot. Mind you, I guess thats kind of the point if you know your directors capable of pulling that sort of stunt, the rest of your performance will be tinged with a very real sense of fear.