THE ABANDONED (2007)
Starring Anastasia Hille and Carlos Reig
The scariest movie in years, "The Abandoned" bristles with the bloodthirsty nihilism of Rob Zombie's "Devils Rejects" while conjuring up ghost-story spookiness of long-lost classics like "Web of the Spider." It is, to put it simply, a totally kick-ass horror movie that should be seen by every self-respecting fear film fan.
Director Nacho Cerdà is best known for his controversial 1994 film "Aftermath" and hasn't been on the horror scene since this masterpiece turned up. This film surpasses "High Tension" in sheer fear volume and is miles better than even "The Descent." But it saw very limited release in the U.S.
Hille plays an American film producer who returns to her Russian homeland, where her mother's dead body has recently been discovered under bizarre circumstances. Having inherited an old, decripit house, she heads out to visit it. Naturally, local superstitions state that the area is damned. Only one man will embark on such a dangerous and long journey -- a stranger that oddly seems to know quite a bit about her history.
Shortly after her arrival to one of the spookiest houses to grace the silver screen since Hell House, the guide mysteriously disappears, forcing our heroine to explore the derelict location alone. After passing a white-eyed ghost of herself in the halls, she wakes up to meet someone else on the property: Nikolai, who claims to have been lured there as she had been. He, too, has a ghost doppelganger on the grounds.
It's rare that a movie scares me. Last one to do it was Zombie's "Devil's Rejects." This one actually surpassed that film for the most part. It was scary. I had forgotten how good ghost stories could be. Director Cerdà captures everything that was right with classics like "Web of the Spider" -- which shares a lot of similarities with this movie, and (perhaps not coincidentally) it was directed by a Spaniard as well -- but amps up the horror so it reaches an almost unbearable crescendo. There's "Web of the Spider," "Evil Dead," "The Shining," even some "Creepshow" sprinkled into this movie. But it holds some of its greatest similarities to the sublime "Session 9."
Cerdà brings in the best the genre has to offer and mixes it together to deliver
a nice, nice, scary-as-hell horror movie. "The Abandoned" will go down as a
classic of this decade.
Directed by Nacho Cerdà