Claustrophobia is scary. Zombies are scary. The dark is scary. All three elements are woven together perfectly in this Spanish chiller from Jaume Balaguero and Paco Plaza, who are pretty much resurrecting the Spanish horror film on their own. You might have seen the American remake, Quarantine, but let me assure you that the original is much scarier and a thousand times more believable.

The film begins in a fire station where our heroine Angela is filming a segment for a news program called "While You're Asleep". This sets up the reason for the film looking like a Blair Witch ripoff, but that couldn't be farther from the truth. In the first 7 minutes Angela jokes and plays around with her segment and the firemen, and everything comes off incredibly real. This is important. Very soon after we believe everyone is not acting, the firemen get called into action. Angela and her cameraman tag along and follow two firemen into an apartment building where the neighbors are complaing about the screams coming out of an old ladies apartment.

They run upstairs with the cops that have responded to the scene and find the old lady bloody and out of her freaking mind! She bites one of the cops and all hell breaks loose. It is obvious that something is going wrong here and as soon as they help the bleeding cop back down to the lobby they find that more police and even the military have arrived and have quarantined the building for some strange reason. They try their best to escape but soon the infection or whatever you want to call it starts to spread and more people get bit and the neighbors start to freak out. A doctor is let into the building to test everyone and explains that a strange virus was detected in one of the neighbor's pets and that tipped them off that something extremely aggressive was infecting people and making them extremely aggressive.

All hell breaks loose yet again as the zombies break free from their bonds and the survivors try to survive the best they can in the dark apartment building with a winding spiral staircase running right through the heart of it. At the end they try to give us an explanation for the outbreak, linking it to an old case of a little girl who according to the church was possessed by demons. The man who lives in the attic apparently studied the phenomena and found it was caused by a virus and not by the devil. The girl is actually still in the house and is let loose at the end. She is the scariest, most realist zombie I have ever seen! If you know Rubber Johnny, you know what I mean when I say realistic and scary.

The film not only has better acting than Quarantine, but there is better camera work, and there is this creepy, moaning soundtrack playing subtly under the action of the film that really helps to unnerve the viewer. The film excellently captures the jump-out scares of a haunted house. The only problem with the film is that the infection takes a long time to resurrect the dead throughout the beginning, but by the last twenty minutes, everyone becomes a zombie immediately. This is a cheat, but such a minor one that it didn't really bother me that much. This is an intense, and scary movie that I promise will have you jumping our of your seat at least a rotting handful of times.

- Jose Prendes