In short: Secreto Matusita (2014)

The film consists out of the – apparently edited – footage that is the final trace of the traditional three student filmmakers (Lupita Mora, Bruno Espejo and Eduardo Ramos). The team manage to bribe their way into the most haunted house in Peru (whose backstory is explained in ten minutes or so of interviews), pack in a medium (Willy Gutiérrez) and start filming in the hopes of being the lucky ones among millions who finally get a ghost or three on camera. As it happens, they will indeed encounter quite a bit of paranormal activity, but even the surprisingly competent medium can’t save them (or himself) from some very bad ends.

Despite not really getting along with it, I found the good parts of Peruvian director Dorian Fernández-Moris’s previous film, Cementerio General, promising enough to try my luck with his next film. I’m happy I did, for while Secreto Matusita certainly isn’t any more original than the cemetery excursion, it is quite a bit more effective. For one, this is a much tighter film, establishing place and characters with effective briefness while still finding space for leading in with some nice ghost stories about the place the characters are going to die in. That last bit really helps in building up mood as well as expectation in an audience and also helps formally ground the film in the genre of paranormal documentaries, making it more convincing.

Once the POV spookery really gets going, this is still a much improved film over its predecessor – the various ghostly apparitions and supernatural shenanigans are well-timed and fun, the character reactions to them believable, and even the final act doesn’t fall into the POV horror trap of consisting of people running and screeching in the dark for half an hour that destroyed Cementerio’s middle part for me. In fact, the spooky old house stays effectively lit for most of the film, and while the camera is a bit shakier than you’d hope those of actual film students would be it’s the kind of shakiness that suggests tension and not an epileptic fit.

As a lover of ghost stories, I appreciated the film first building the house up through the kind of short, ambiguous takes that make up much of authentic ghost lore too, all of which will be important in some way or the other later in the film, and which certainly added a greater feeling of veracity than is usual in this sort of outing, as does the fact that the stories localize the house’s past in Peruvian ephemeral history, making it more specific and less generic through this.


Add to that the film’s tight running time and general air of competence, and you not only have a nice improvement on Fernández-Moris’s first film, but a genuinely fine bit of POV horror.

In short: Cementerio General (2013)

Iquitos, Peru. A bunch of teenagers decide to assuage the grief of one of their own for her dead father by sneaking onto the picturesque Cementario General by night and holding a ouija board session. As you will surely be surprised to hear, things don’t go too well, and soon a possessed eleven year old does what possessed people in movies do – though she has to play on tomb roofs instead of hang in ceiling corners on account of a despicable lack of ceilings – and everyone runs around, screeching. But wait, there’s more, because all of this is part of some revenge plot for some adulterous family business. The film doesn’t bother to get into why the kids not part of any of the families involved have to die too.

At the beginning and in its final act, Dorian Fernández-Moris’s Cementerio General is a decently shot, if been-there, done-that low budget horror movie, just coming from Peru instead of a backyard near me, again demonstrating that the drive to make a horror movie, any horror movie is something like a universal impulse. The young actors are decent enough, the director stages scenes with a promising eye, and the long-suffering viewer is hopeful for whatever follows. However, once the full-on POV middle part of the story came around, my patience frayed increasingly. There’s a certain amount of night-vision shaky-cam and running around screeching in the dark I can take with no problem, but once a film does like Cementerio General and adds quite a few out of focus shots to what feels already like a lifetime of shaking and screeching, even I start sighing sarcastically. Even more so when I encounter this in a film that demonstrated before, and will demonstrate in its final act, too, that it knows how to stage things straight and somewhat effectively.


The possessed kid is neither terribly convincing nor used very effectively either. All this leaves us with a film that has an okay beginning, a godawful middle, and a decent ending.