The Quintanilla family has a house in Sitges that they haven’t visited in a decade, so all five of them pack into the car and head up for the summer. The two teens have vague memories of the home from when they were much younger, but it’s the local legend of a ghostly girl in the forest that catches their attention. They document their exploration of the house and the giant maze attached to their back yard on video, and soon they’re hearing strange noises at night and seeing mysterious figures in woods. When their younger brother goes missing the family rushes into the maze to find him, and, well, let’s just say the Quintanillas can get by with a smaller Christmas tree this year. Atrocious is the bastard Spanish love-child of Blair Witch Project and Insidious, and yes, in that scenario Insidious is the male who donated little more than a genre and a one word adjective for a name. It falls victim to some of the same problems that plague most found footage films… namely a meandering first half, segments consisting of little more than the camera being shaken repeatedly, and the nagging question as to why these people are still filming, but it also creates and builds enough solid tension and legitimately frightening scenes to mark it as one of the better examples of the genre.

What do you call a zombie movie without zombies? The smart-asses among you will say 28 Days Later, but that at least had killer humans acting like zombies… no, I’m referring more to the idea and atmosphere of a zombie movie but without the actual brain-munching undead. What you’d have is the new, blackly comic, Argentinian thriller, Phase 7. Coco (Daniel Hendler) and his very pregnant wife Pipi (Jazmín Stuart) are shopping and bickering with love when the other customers around them start panicking and rushing the store. It’s a peripheral panic though as the couple barely notices the frenetic nature of their fellow city dwellers. At least not until they return home and see news that a global virus has spread to epidemic level and has finally reached their home of Buenos Aires. A quick trip down to the lobby late at night sees a neighbor being wheeled out and a plastic barrier going up… the building has been quarantined and the residents are trapped within.

The Blair Witch phenomenon seems to come full circle here in a movie that doesn’t try to mask itself as a documentary, but still features a crew of people investigating some weird goings-on in a small town’s forestland. The hook? Seventy years ago, some townspeople started walking up a path and were never heard from again. Now, it’s up to a team to uncover the mystery, even if the current citizens aren’t exactly brimming with information or a desire to talk about the past. For a lower budget horror film, YellowBrickRoad looks like it has potential, but it almost always looks ridiculous when the production team uses a moronic title and throws in a supposedly “creepy” whisper of a famous line from The Wizard of Oz over their story that seems to have nothing to do with The Wizard of Oz except said moronic title.