Program Note
Retired cop Jano, paranormal specialist Dr. Albreck and her colleague visit Juan in prison. They want to help Juan, a mere witness and not suspect to the death of his wife who was killed by an unspeakable force. To disclose and destroy the dark entity that has invaded the neighborhood, especially the triangle of three houses: Walter’s, where it all started; Juan’s, where an inexplicable murder took place; and Alicia’s, whose 10 year old son came back as a decomposing moving corpse after being killed in a car accident, the three experts team up with Deputy Funes to embark on a deadly mission. Like the title Terrified , the film successfully maintains a mood of terror through an ensemble of tight camerawork, music and slow-paced build-up of tension. As it constantly shifts between fantasy and reality that confuses one’s sense of time and space, Terrified seems to share the same idea of the house and neighborhood as a metaphor for the human psyche and community dynamics as well as the site of the horrific like Wes Craven’s The Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). By seeing the house as a place of “darkness, light, two realities sharing the same place and time” Terrified urges us to ‘look inside and not the outside for the source of one’s horror‘.