So I Sat Down to Watch… Aterrados (2017)
Cosmic horror, the horror of the unknown or of the things that simply cannot be known, is often said to be unfilmable. There are many variables in cosmic horror, and most of them cannot be filmed in an appropriate manner, or at least that’s what people suggest. Yet, all the same, there have been several examples to the contrary over the years, and most are actually small-budget movies.
Aterrados is one of those examples. It’s got a small budget, it’s from Argentina and if not for the fact that it’s on Netflix, I probably wouldn’t have even heard about it. But it’s better than most of the big studio horror movies I’ve watched in the last decade.
Horror, of course, is very subjective. One person’s nightmare is another one’s fun pastime, and for some if there’s no jump scare then it’s not a horror movie. I have some friends that fall in the latter category, and I would like to cordially apologize, on their behalf, to all of you.
For me, horror is a slow-burn, the knowledge that you’re slowly heading straight into a bad situation that’s only going to get worse, and you know that there’s nothing you can really do to prevent that. Horror for me comes from that which cannot be conceived, that which defies description by human standards, things that would be to us like ants trying to explain a black hole to their peers.
Of course, this is why cosmic horror is difficult to film; how can you show that which you cannot explain? This is exactly the kind of horror that Aterrados offers, though, and is part of the reason why I liked it so much. For the vast majority of the film, we don’t really get to see what’s haunting the human characters (ironically, we see it on the movie’s cover), only that it’s something very wrong. We get a few glimpses of the “creatures”, sure, but never a good enough one. They only tease us enough so that our imaginations will fill in the blanks with our personal worst fears, as good horror should.
Then, there is also the fact that we don’t really know what these entities want from us humans. In most horror films you get at least a glimpse at their motivations; serial killers want to kill, ghosts want others to know their pain or have someone solve whatever it was that made them into ghosts in the first place, demons want something personal or just as often they are after a child, aliens want to take our place on the planet, and so on and so forth. The list is endless.
True horror, again this goes for me personally, is not knowing why this other being wants to harm us. This means we matter so little to it that it shouldn’t have to justify its actions to us in the first place. I’d wager that you, like myself, might have terrorized an ants’ nest or two when you were kids. The meanest amongst you might have waited until the ants were carrying their eggs between nests to strike. That sheer panic that hits an ant colony when something hundreds of times larger than them attacks out of nowhere, and for no reason, killing dozens of them and perhaps dooming the entire colony by destroying their eggs, their very future.
But none of us really cared, because at the end of the day they’re just ants. Right? We never felt compelled to justify our actions to a bunch of ants. It was all a bit of fun.
I do realize I’m kind of ranting here instead of actually talking about the movie, but I feel that I need to justify my liking of this movie when it’s not scary in the traditional sense. And Aterrados is exactly that. It’s a slow-burn film that features a mostly unseen threat that care little about revealing its existence and its intent to a bunch of human-shaped ants.
Time to get a bit more specific on what I love about the movie, I guess. One thing I really enjoyed was the very successful misdirect the movie hits us with as soon as it starts. In its first minutes, Aterrados feels like just another ghost story. Some woman is thrown against the wall by an angry poltergeist, and some dude is seeing things inside his house. Yawn.
Then something interesting happens. The dude sets up a camera to see what’s up in his house, and that’s when you see it. One moment the “thing” (no, not that “The Thing”) isn’t there, but then… it is. Just shows up out of nowhere. Now, technically speaking, ghosts should be able to do that if they were real, but they don’t really do that in the language of cinema; they’re either there, or they’re not. So the movie tells us very early, and very cleverly, that something else is happening here, something that we’re not really used to.
Earlier in this post, I kept going on and on about how the movie tells us nothing about the creatures’ intentions. There’s another reason why this works that I didn’t mention, however. We get to experience what the movie’s characters are experiencing. Exposition is something that humans care about, we want to know why the house is haunted, why Freddy Kruger likes to kill teenagers.
But these things here aren’t human, and they don’t care about our needs. They’re not here to make sense, they’re here to do whatever the fuck they want, and we’re just as powerless to their will as the characters in the film are.
All this is propped up by great camera work, a smart use of practical effects and actors that do just enough to make us believe in their intentions. Even the weak link amongst the characters, the American paranormal investigator, perfectly fits the Lovecraftian character who has seen so much that his mind just… snapped. Oftentimes in HPL’s work these dudes become cultists, worshiping the thing that took their sanity away, but there’s no time in Aterrados for that kind of nonsense. In fact, I think we never really find out what happened to the guy. Just another ant, I guess.
The other thing that this movie does really well is how all of the action is essentially confined to three houses, or rather, two houses and a psychiatric facility. It really makes things feel claustrophobic and tense, while also hitting that old nerve where you can’t feel safe in your own house, perhaps the only place in the world where you should.
And boy, are the characters in this movie not safe. They get dealt with (it’s unclear whether they die or not) in such swift and gruesome manners, it’s actually outstanding what the film’s crew has managed to do with the limited resources they have at hand.
Sure, all the above are great and all, but what really makes Aterrados special for me is how it uses one of my favorite uh. Things, from Physics: Quantum Superposition.
Now, while I have read extensively on what this silly-sounding thing is and how it works, I have to confess I still don’t understand it fully nor do I feel comfortable enough to explain what it really is. The best I can offer you is this article here.
What is really interesting is that the movie never directly references this, there’s no 10-minute long exposition scene where a stereotypical science nerd explains the movie to us. Much like the motives of the entities, we are never told anything, we just see the effects of superposition on the human characters. Some end up occupying the same space as the furniture inside their house, others are perpetually on fire, not dead but not alive either. Others can be heard but not seen, occupying a space just between our realities.
This is also why the entities can seemingly appear and disappear in an instant. It’s not that we couldn’t see them, it’s just that they weren’t actually there, in our reality, in that moment.
It’s brilliant.
So yeah, that’s Aterrados, a great horror film and another reminder that you don’t need a big budget to make a good flick. You just need a good idea that’s implemented in a smart way. You’d think that this would be a given by now, and you wouldn’t need a reminder, but here we are.