Quarantine 2008

Spoiler alert: I will be talking about what happens in the film and how it ends.

With so many films to choose from, If there is one film that I feel left me scared for days in October 2008, it would have to be the film Quarantine. It is an American found footage horror film directed and co-written by John Erick Dowdle. The film was a remake of the Spanish film REC which came out in 2007. (Which let me tell you, was just as scary, but some-what funny because hearing the actors yelling and screaming profanity in Spanish was funny. English is my first language.) But let’s get back to talking about the film Quarantine 2008.

As it says, it’s found footage, so it is supposed to look like what you see in the video is real and had happened to the people on the footage. But thankfully, the footage was all played by professional actors, greenscreens, and a lot of make-up. Yes, there was a film that was in the same format of found footage and was just as scary. It was called “The Blaire Witch Project.” It was filmed in 1999. Why didn’t I pick “The Blaire Witch Project”? Because I was seventeen years old at the time, and I was a damn coward who got scared so easily. Oh, wait, there was The Paranormal Activity series and Cloverfield. I felt Quarantine was way scarier; I think viruses are more frightening than ghosts and monsters. I mean, right now it is 2020, and there is a pandemic, everyone is scared out of their mind because of what? A virus called COVID-19 or Coronavirus. (Which to be honest, it looks like a ball with a whole lot of thumbtacks.)

The footage explains that someone came down with the flu; only it wasn’t the flu; it was a new type of virus almost related to rabies. And the news crew that is filming gets trapped in a building where it is ground zero where the virus initially came from. The special effects look so real, everything from the firefighter falling, cutting open a head to pull the brain out. Even patient zero that was locked up in the attic, and a child acting like a prototype for a cure, look so real as if they were deformed because of the virus.

The day I went to see it was a couple of days before Halloween. I went to see it with my husband, my little brother, and my nephew. We were on our way to Knott’s Scary Farm, but for some reason, on that day, everyone and their mother is at Knott’s Scary Farm. Oh yeah, we were annoyed. So, we thought the movies would be better. And it was because we had the whole auditorium to ourselves. Hell, we were able to put our feet up. We were screaming, talking, and swearing, both in English and Spanish, in certain scenes. There were two scenes that made us jump; the first was when the little girl who had signs of the flu went from sweet and innocent to a demonic wild animal by biting her mom in the neck then running up to the other disappearing. After a few minutes, this little devil reappears and bites another person before getting shot to death. The second scene was towards the ending when my poor little brother and my nephew were so scared they both slept with the light on. My husband was shaken up because of the visual effects. As for me, I was shaken up thinking did what I just saw happen? All I can say is "Holy shit!"