Key:
Protagonist
Stock Characters
Themes
Plots and Stock situations
REC revolves around a television reporter, Ángela Vidal (Manuela Velasco), and her cameraman, Pablo (only his trainers are shown, Pablo Rosso), who cover the night shift in one of Barcelona's local fire stations for the fictional documentary television series Mientras ustedes duermen (While You Sleep). The firehouse receives a call from an apartment building about a woman who is trapped. When Manu (Ferrán Terraza) and Álex (David Vert) arrive, the police break down the door, with Ángela and Pablo recording their actions. The woman becomes extraordinarily aggressive and bites one of the policemen. Meanwhile, the terrified residents gather in the entrance hall, and look on as the police and military seal off the building. The firefighter who remained at the old lady's apartment is bitten and tossed down the stairs. The camera crew, the remaining cop (Jorge Yaman) and the second firefighter go up again and are attacked. The cop apparently kills the old lady with a shot, which is confirmed by Ángela who asks Pablo to rewind and replay that part of the tape. The camera crew remain trapped inside the building with the residents, and continue recording in spite of police pressure. Ángela interviews a little girl named Jennifer (Claudia Silva) who lives with her parents and dog in the building. Jennifer is ill with what her mother (María Lanau) claims is tonsilitis. She says her dog, Max, is at the veterinarian because he appeared to be sick as well.
A health inspector wearing a hazmat suit arrives and attempts to treat the injured, who become fiercely violent despite their critical injuries. The health inspector explains that the time the disease takes to cause sickness depends on blood type. The health inspector also reveals that, sometime during the previous day, a dog with the illness was taken to the veterinarian; the dog became violent and attacked and killed other pets at the clinic. The dog was euthanized, and was traced back to the apartment building. Jennifer, the girl who owned the dog, then suddenly attacks her mother. The inspector tells the distraught residents that this unknown but virulent disease is infecting people, causing them to turn into bloodthirsty savages. More and more people in the building become infected, and Ángela and Pablo are forced to fight them off. They find out that some of the corpses have disappeared and soon discover that the people presumed dead are now infected and chasing them. Eventually they learn that there is a key to a door in the apartment building workshop, which leads to an exit via the sewer system. However, the key is located on the third floor in a resident's apartment.
After finding the key, Ángela and Pablo appear to be the only human survivors, everyone else being dead or infected. Rather than making their way to the workshop, they are forced upstairs to the penthouse by the remaining infected. They then search the penthouse, and discover that its former owner was an agent of the Vatican who was charged with researching and isolating a suspected virus believed to be the biological cause of demonic possession, which was later confirmed to exist in a young girl who was supposedly possessed. The agent kidnapped and brought the girl to the penthouse to conduct his research and to possibly cure her; unfortunately, during the work the virus managed to mutate and become contagious. A door to the attic opens, and Pablo uses his camera to look inside. Something jumps at the camera and breaks its light. Pablo turns on the night vision to see in the dark and discovers the sealed door referenced earlier by the priest on an audio tape. The agent abandoned his efforts to cure the girl after failing to engineer a vaccine and sealed her in the room before leaving the city for good. The girl, now a ghoulishly emaciated figure, begins searching the kitchen area, unaware of Ángela and Pablo's presence. Pablo tries to escape, but trips and is viciously attacked by the girl, making Pablo drop the camera. Ángela picks it up and runs, only to trip and drop the camera as well. She searches for it but is unable to find it. The camera continues to record as the screams of the infected girl are heard and Ángela is dragged into the darkness, screaming.
Key:
Protagonist
Stock Characters
Themes
Plots and Stock situations
The story begins with two teenage girls discussing the events of the previous weekend, during which one of them, Katie Embry (played by Amber Tamblyn), went to a cabin in the mountains to spend time with some friends. While talking, the subject of a supposedly cursed videotape is brought up. The other girl, Rebecca 'Becca' Kotler (played by Rachael Bella), states that anyone who watches this video receives a phone call, in which a voice says, "you will die in seven days." Then, exactly seven days (to the minute) after viewing the tape, the viewer dies. Katie reveals in horror that she had watched that video at the cabin last weekend with three friends, exactly seven days earlier. After a series of unexplainable occurrences, involving a television in the house turning itself on and eerie sounds, Katie is mysteriously killed while Becca has the misfortune of watching, causing her to be institutionalized in a mental hospital.
The film then introduces Katie's aunt, Rachel (played by Naomi Watts), a journalist living in Seattle. Her son, Aidan, was not only Katie's cousin but also a good friend, and seems to be sensitive to psychic occurrences. Aidan's teacher brings to Rachel's attention that he had been drawing pictures of his cousin dead in the ground for days before Katie actually died. At Katie's funeral, Rachel's sister asks her to investigate her daughter's death, and, as she begins, she learns of the videotape. Her investigation leads her to the same cabin in the mountains where Katie and her friends had watched the tape. There, she finds the tape and eventually watches it. After that the phone rings and a girl says - seven days. The next day she calls Noah, Aiden's father, to see the video. He asks her to make a copy for further investigation. Unfortunately, Aidan watches the tape a couple days later.
After viewing the tape, strange things begin to happen to Rachel, and presumably anyone else who had viewed the cursed images. She experiences terrible nightmares, nose bleeds, and curious surreal situations (such as when she pauses a section of the cursed tape in which a fly is running across the screen, she finds she is able to pluck it from the monitor). Rachel's investigation turns to the tape itself, which contains a seemingly random series of disturbing, grainy, black and white images. Investigating those images leads Rachel to Anna Morgan (the woman seen in the tape) who lived on Moesko Island with her husband and daughter, and raised horses. Rachel discovers that a mysterious tragedy befell the Morgan ranch, in which all the horses seemed to go mad, killing themselves attempting to flee the ranch. For reasons that were never completely explained, this presumably caused Anna Morgan to become severely depressed, and shortly after taking residence at a mental institution, to commit suicide. Rachel goes to the Morgan's house and finds Richard Morgan who refuses to talk about the video or his daughter. Rachel goes to see the local doctor to ask about the Morgan family. The old doctor tells her that Anna wanted a child more than anything, but was never able to successfully carry a fetus to term. One winter they left and returned with Samara whom they adopted. But after some time Anna started complaining about visions that only happened when Samara was around, so she sent them both to a mental institute on the continent. Noah goes to the institute and finds Anna Morgan's file and discovers that a video is missing. Rachel goes back to the Morgan's house and after watching the video of Samara's conversation with the doctor is confronted by Richard Morgan. He states the girl was evil, and then promptly kills himself with an elaborate toaster-in-the-bathtub type scheme.
Noah arrives at the house just after Richard's death, and together with Rachel, he goes to the barn to discover a little room where Samara was kept by her father. Behind the wallpaper they discover a burned image of a tree recognizable from the video tape, and Rachel remembers seeing it near the cabin at Shelter Mountain Inn. They arrive there and discover a well underneath the floor. Rachel is led to where Samara was killed; at the bottom of a well. Rachel gets stuck in the well and finds Samara's body. Samara, or at any rate, the not-completely-dead body of Samara, shows Rachel how her mother took her to the well and dropped her there. Rachel notifies the authorities, and the now apparently dead Samara is given a proper burial, presumably putting her spirit to rest. Noah asks her how long could you survive there and Rachel guesses that you could survive seven days.
At this point it seems that everything is well again, and Rachel informs Aidan that they will no longer be troubled by Samara. However, Aidan quickly corrects her and says that Samara's spirit has been released, evident by the bruises on his arm, given by Samara in a nightmare that Rachel also experienced. In the film's most unsettling and memorable scene, Noah is going over some film prints in his apartment when his TV turns on to static, in the same fashion that Rachel's niece Katie experienced before her death. Noah turns it off casually before the TV turns itself on again, which alerts Noah. He is then treated to a recurring image of a well, in which a long-haired female figure (Samara) crawls out of the well and slowly walks toward the screen. It intensifies as Noah quickly backs away and Samara literally crawls out of the television set. Noah knocks over a shelf in fear and crawls away before turning around, only to have Samara stare directly at him, causing his inevitable death which Rachel discovers after racing to his apartment. Rachel is scared and worried that Aidan would die too when she realizes that the only way to escape Samara after watching the video is to make a copy of the tape and show it to someone else, thus continuing the cycle. The movie ends with Rachel helping Aiden to make a copy of the tape.
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