Some preliminary thoughts on REC and REC2

 I just want to jot down some early notes on REC.  Some movies are hard to unravel because on the surface there doesn't seem to be much to talk about beyond the plot, but I've come to understand over the years that this is itself a sign that the movie (or text or narrative) has been highly "naturalized" within the framework of the ideological forces that we find ourselves in.  It's like if you live in a repressive regime and you suggest something critical about the national leadership, you find yourself in big trouble or labeled as a crazy person.  The result of this repression is a naturalized blindness to issues of criticism.  >ahem<

So, my early not-so-surprising observations have to do with women in the film who are keeping secrets of one sort or another.  There are several who are keeping secrets or are accused of keeping secrets including the final "witch".  But several of the occupants of the building seem to be harboring secrets as well.   On the level of the film, these "secrets" come off as innocuous moments of withholding narrative information like the mother of the child who finally "turns" (another secret revealed) into a zombie or possessed creature.  

The interesting thing about the narrator/protagonist of the film is that she apparently has no secrets to keep.   And her job seems to be to uncover secrets or information under the guise of being a news reporter.  She is an innocent like the young woman who had been possessed and taken to the attic of the building where the action of the movie takes place.  When we learn in REC2 that the reporter has been possessed as well, we essentially see another moment when a different version of reproduction takes place -- ie the worm/slug thing that moves from the witch's mouth into the reporter's mouth.  Physically, this is an important moment and one that appears in many horror movies -- the moment of possession or perhaps "reproduction".  

(I'm purposefully avoiding the term "infection" for now since the worm/slug seems more than an infection but an overt invasion of her body.   In this sense, the worm/slug seems to be a replacement for a phallus in the more familiar heteronormative sense.)

What is the nature of the reproduction that I'm focusing on?  In the context of other "witch" films, the activity of invasion or possession is tied to the need to continue or procreate within a non-heteronormative context.  So, a witch's community requires new members to be initiated that don't require sexual intercourse.   The "horror" is partly the inventive (well, maybe not so inventive these days) way that a person is invaded.   How many movies have a scene where a ghost/demon/possessed creature open its mouth and spews something into the mouth of a person who is often troubled by what appears to be "normal" anxieties and social pressures?

There is much to unravel here and the thing I want to mention also is that the Catholic church is acting as the instigator of secrets -- and the initial activity in the attic itself maybe the inaugurating violation that starts it all.  The church then becomes an important keeper of secrets, but it also then creates the demons and monsters that it thinks it's fighting.