Found Footage Horror Remake is a thrilling zombie experience

According to Jonathan Klotz
| Published 26 seconds ago

At the height of the found footage craze, low-budget horror films were able to use the technique to tell innovative stories such as Paranormal activity or cloverfield, or taking a classic horror story and remaking it into something new. 2008 Quarantine uses found footage through the eyes of a news crew to put you in the middle of a zombie outbreak, making an old-school survival story seem different just by changing perspective. Found footage isn’t a popular format these days and it’s debatable how well period films have aged, but a few are worth watching today, including SPEECHa Spanish-language film remade by Hollywood Quarantine.

Nowhere To Run

Quarantine begins with the news crew of Angela, a reporter (Jennifer Carpenter) and cameraman Scott (Steve Harris) follow firefighters as they respond to a call at an apartment building that looks suspiciously like rabies. An old woman infected with a mysterious virus attacks the group, which now includes a pair of policemen, before being shot down. We soon see the building’s exits, including all the windows, sealed by the CDC in a first-person view, turning the act of plastic wrap into a terrifying death sentence.

The ranks of the infected begin to swell and they have nowhere to escape, leading to most of them Quarantine scare jumps and most of his kills. Attempting to escape the building will result in the sniper taking out the occupants, forcing the survivors to try and find their way out, which is a bit confusing. The end result robs the film of some of its horror by revealing too much about the origin of the infection in a textbook example of why it’s better to leave the audience wanting more.

Relics of a bygone era

You can’t talk about it Quarantine without introducing the original film SPEECHone of the most successful Spanish horror films of all time. The original film, darker than the English remake and better paced, is still considered one of the best found footage films of all time. It went on to three more sequels that branched out into an elaborate mythology that ended up including a Vatican conspiracy.

Quarantineon the other hand, it had only one sequel, Quarantine 2: Terminal, which takes place on a plane before extinction. While the original is better, even the Hollywood remake is better than most low-budget found footage horrors of the era, despite the weak plot and stumbling in the third act. The film grossed $41 million in theaters, making it a success given its low production budget.

Found footage movies are few and far between these days, especially with the diminishing returns of the Paranormal Activity franchise, which is changing movies like Quarantine to relics of a bygone era in pop culture. It is also an example of when Hollywood felt the need to remake foreign films, e.g. Ring or Spitecompared to today when movies are liked Train to Busan is allowed to intervene streaming. Zombie movies have been around for over 60 years, dating back to the days of science fiction Day of the Triffidsand it takes a lot to stand out, but breaking out in first person with nowhere to run is definitely something else.

Quarantine is available on Video on Demand via YouTube, Amazon Prime Videoand Apple TV.