This is my review for the horror movie Terrified (2017), also known as Aterrados.

 

If you can’t be bothered to read my entire take on the film, scroll to the bottom of the page for my quick summary and rating.

I saw this movie on Shudder and had remembered someone claiming that it was one of the scariest movies of the year. Maybe Shudder itself claimed that? I don’t remember now. But any time I see those claims, I have to see for myself if the film is a contender for scariest of the year. Spoiler Alert: This film isn’t. Also, SPOILER ALERT: I’m not going to hold back from talking about what happens in the film. Skip down to the bottom of the review for a spoiler-free rating.

Terrified is not a horrible movie by any means. It has some very unique and interesting elements that I enjoyed, however, I was also left with a lot of questions and wanting more from the film at the end. So with all that together, it ends up being just an okay movie.

The film starts by showing us three different paranormal occurrences that take place relatively at the same time, in three houses, on a residential block in a suburban neighborhood in Buenos Aries.

In the first house, a woman hears voices and noises coming from the kitchen sink and thinks she’s going crazy. Later that night, her husband hears banging and thinks it’s his neighbor doing some late night remodeling. He pounds on the wall, he screams through the wall, and gets up and goes outside to scream at his neighbor before trying to go back to bed. The pounding begins again and he realizes it is coming from the bathroom where his wife is. He finds her lifeless body, suspending in the air by seemingly ghostly forces, being banged back and forth against the wall, making a beautiful, bloody mess.

In the second house, we get to see what happened to the remodeling neighbor, who was being gradually haunted and terrified by a tall, skinny, naked man who would stand over him while he was sleeping and move things around. Instead of relying on tension and then one, horrifying and violent image, this section gave us more of the anxiety of knowing the monster man was somewhere in the house and we just didn’t know when and where we were going to see him. I thought this segment, like the first, was scary and had great imagery.

In the final instance of paranormal activity, we see a little boy get hit by a bus. Then later, after the shock of the accident and the young boys funeral, it is discovered that the corpse of the little boy, after having been buried, is now sitting at his mother’s dining room table. This segment was also very well done and was generally pretty frightening.

So we see what happens in the first house, then the second and then the third. I think this is where the movie shines. Each supernatural event in the houses was scary and each was different and interesting. Showing us what has happened in these three houses takes up 2/3 of the film.

At this point, I’ve enjoyed everything. I’m engaged with what’s going on, and I know I’m meant to believe that what is happening to these three families is somehow related and I’m just waiting to be shown how.

It was when it started delving into the “how” that things got a little murky and the movie ended too quickly before any of the questions the film asked could be answered.

So once all three of the stories had been told, and we now know what is happening in these houses, a team of expert investigators is assembled to go to the three houses and hopefully figure out what is happening and how to stop it.

Here, the film was on the precipice of greatness. Here is where I thought, “Wow, this movie is going to be amazing!” And here is where I was let down. The whole premise just started swiftly rolling downhill and ended up being just okay.

So we get our gang of researchers and scientists who apparently specialize in researching exactly this type of thing (We still don’t really understand what this type of thing is yet), and while we don’t know these characters very well, we’re looking forward to seeing what they discover as they each simultaneously occupy one of the houses for the night to conduct their investigation. This part of the movie felt rushed, and way too short.

So while we’re with these scientists, we are told that these entities or creatures are from another dimension, that perhaps they travel through water, that they suck human blood, and that they move through time and space in unpredictable ways (sometimes you can see them and sometimes you can’t) because….other dimensions?

One of the characters that joins the scientists on their investigation is a cop who we’ve gotten to know a bit throughout the film. This cop doesn’t know any of the science behind what’s been happening, and this is not his field of expertise. I feel like the climax of the movie is told from his perspective, through his eyes, and since we’re following him, and he doesn’t know what is going on, we don’t know what’s going on either. We get snippets of the scientist revealing small details before they die. However, one of the scientists at one point tells the police officer not to believe everything he sees, and then later, after her neck has been snapped, her corpse runs out of the house to tell him not to leave and to save them. Did her neck really get snapped then? Did that really happen or not?

So it all gets confusing as the audience is not privy to the knowledge that the scientists have and do not share. And it wasn’t clear whether what happens in the last act of the movie is a distortion of the police officers reality caused by the multi-dimensional monsters or not.

Eventually, our police officer lights all the houses on fire and I was left wondering if the scientists were really dead or not and if he had burned them all alive.

The movie ends with the husband from the first segment, who has been in a mental hospital/jail this whole time seeing one of the scientist’s ghosts? with burns on his face that no one else can see.

So these entities are able to infest a home, but how did they reanimate a child’s corpse? How do they move through dimensions and reality? Through water? And the ghosts scientists at the end, are they ghosts or monsters? WHAT HAS HAPPENED HERE?

Anyway, I thought that taking your typical haunting and having it be these entities that can manipulate dimension spaces and realities was really unique and interesting. I just wish there had been more of that and we had gotten a little more meat with the awesome bones.

Summary and Rating: After there are a series of supernatural occurrences in three houses in an idyllic family neighborhood, a group of investigators sets out to discover what’s causing the strange incidents.  Overall the film tried to take the supernatural in an interesting direction by having the paranormal events not be due to your typical haunting. And while there were some tense moments and a few scares, they explained very little and the movie seemed to end abruptly leaving the viewer with many, many questions.

Rating 3/5.