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I’m a little embarrassed to admit it, but there’s a moment in the Spanish horror movie [REC] (which recently screened at the Edmonton Film Festival) that made me scream out loud. I’m embarrassed because it’s such a cheap scare: a TV reporter and her cameraman are trapped in the top floor of an apartment building, and they think something might be crawling around above their heads in the attic. So the cameraman sticks his camera through the trapdoor and starts slowly panning around the darkened, cluttered room, the light from his camera providing the only illumination. Around he pans, slowly... slowly... slowly.. slowly... and then... BOOGA-BOOGA! A creepy mutant with sharp teeth jumps into the frame!

The same sequence takes place in Quarantine, a nearly shot-for-shot American remake of [REC], and damned if it didn’t make me jump all over again. Now, you don’t have to be any kind of genius filmmaker to scare an audience by essentially jumping out of the closet at them, but it does take a certain amount of low directorial cunning to string a bunch of those moments together in an effectively audience-rattling way. Neither [REC] nor Quarantine have any goal in mind beyond scaring the audience senseless — the monsters aren’t metaphors for any unconscious terrors, there are no political points being made about governments depriving citizens of their civil rights. These two movies are scare machines, pure and simple. But there’s a place at the multiplex for a well-constructed scare machine, and [REC] (and, to a lesser extent, Quarantine) got the audiences I was with worked up into a state of giddy, babbling excitement the likes of which I haven’t seen in a long time.

The setup is fairly clever: a cute TV reporter (Jennifer Carpenter, Michael C. Hall’s foul-mouthed sister Deb on Dexter), is hanging out overnight at a fire department, collecting footage for a show about after-dark workers. After killing a few hours lightly flirting with the firefighters, the truck is summoned to an apartment building where an old woman is having some kind of medical emergency. It seems like a routine call, until the old woman leaps on one of the firemen and rips his throat out. And when the men try to get the injured man to a hospital, they find they can’t leave the building — the authorities have barricaded them inside. It soon emerges that a strain of super-rabies has broken out in the building, and the government would rather let the inhabitants die off than risk the disease getting loose in the general population.

It’s your standard siege movie — lots of arguments about who’s in charge, lots of people ineffectually barricading doors and windows, order gradually giving way to chaos as more and more people get infected. But, as with Cloverfield and The Blair Witch Project, the fact that we’re experiencing everything through the limited perspective of a shaky, handheld video camera gives the whole thing a wild, spontaneous energy that you wouldn’t find in a more traditionally shot version of the same story. (You also wouldn’t get that gory scene where the camera guy uses his camera to bash a rabid zombie’s skull in. It feels like the moment that this whole “POV horror” subgenre has been building towards.)

Sure, Quarantine contains a lot of overly convenient plot turns and a few unlikely feats of derring-do (especially considering how the characters are running around in an unfamiliar building at night with the power off), but it’s paced so quickly that you hardly have time to care.

Which version is scarier? I’d give a slight edge to [REC], but maybe that’s just because I saw it first and so it seemed fresher. Quarantine makes its plot points with more clarity than [REC], but [REC]’s lead actress is more appealing. On the other hand, unlike [REC], Quarantine actually seems to understand that a video camera can’t rewind and record at the same time.