Not to be confused with the 2016 cult hit Terrifier, Terrified [Aterrados] is a low budget Argentine horror that sets out to live up to its name. 

(But go see the fun 70’s gorefest throwback Terrifier. Art the Clown deserves love too.)

In a perfect world, Demián Rugna’s Terrified will be rediscovered in some TikTok scary movie challenge. But then again, a perfect world wouldn’t need a thing like TikTok to help champion overlooked movies.

Terrified begins with Clara, a young housewife who has been hearing a voice coming from the kitchen- or more specifically her drainpipe. She tells her husband and he tries to rationalize the voice’s origin until Clara divulges that the voice said it wants to kill her.

Then at night…well, I’ll let you watch.

Later, we go back a few weeks to meet Clara’s neighbour Walter, a man desperate for help from a paranormal specialist. To get help, he is told he needs proof, so he goes back to his house and…yeah…that happens.

Next, we see the boy across the street chasing his soccer ball and…

My God, houses in this Latin community are creating a bigger body count than that Japanese townhouse in Ju-On. 

Speaking of Ju-On, Terrified also shares a few other similarities with that film as well. Both films employ a shifting protagonist as a way of keeping audiences  unsure about who is important enough to live- or at least important enough to survive a little while longer. And like Ju-On: The Grudge, Terrified is also one of the scarier paranormal films out there.

Terrified‘s plot takes an interesting turn when the police are called to investigate a corpse that seems to have made its way back to its home. At the moment it doesn’t appear to be moving, though some of the police on the scene aren’t so sure they haven’t seen movement. Baffled, the commissioner calls in a paranormal investigator to check out the scene and before we know it, two other paranormal investigators arrive to test their theories regarding similar phenomenons. Three investigators, one police commissioner and three very freaky houses. It’s going to be one wild night.

I like films where the paranormal activity has an exceptionally large cruel streak and Terrified is no exception. These are some nasty ghouls.

What really sells Terrified is Demián Rugna’s keen scene of horror cinematography and special effects. In particular, what happens in Walter’s bedroom is a masterclass in low-budget horror filmmaking. (of course the cinephile in me watched the scene play out and then immediately went back and watched the scene again.) Rugna understands how to create lasting images of horror. The shenanigans between the houses during the investigation offers a number of memorable scares too.

Normally, I dislike films that include paranormal specialists, but the three included in Terrified have an interesting dynamic about them and unlike most films where the specialists are a little too knowing, but I don’t see the explanations they provide in this film as definitive. In fact, I’ve read some who criticize the fact that some of the plot points in the film don’t match the explanations that we are given. I agree, but one of my favourite things about this film is that our paranormal specialists seem more like regular people trying their best to put into some rational context the weird things they have seen. Just because they have an explanation for what is going on doesn’t mean they have landed on the right one. If they had, things would have ended a lot differently.

Of all the films on The Midnight Selections, Terrified feels like one of the most criminally overlooked. Fortunately, it gained some brief recognition when it first appeared on the horror platform Shudder. Rugna has even mentioned interest in a doing a sequel. And considering how much some of the ghouls look like something inspired by the mind of Guillermo del Toro, it is no wonder del Toro is rumoured to have bought rights to a Terrified remake.

Terrified might still have some life yet after all, even without the help of TikTok