This Geek In Netflix: The Baby’s Room

I have a thing for horror movies revolving around children.  And by “thing”, I mean that they rarely fail to at least freak me out if not leave me anxiously searching for the little midgets in dark corners for months afterwards (The Orphanage, I’m looking at you).

So when I saw the Spanish movie The Baby’s Room floating around in my Netflix queue, I was both terrified and intrigued.  More terrified than intrigued, honestly, as it took me months to get around to watching it.

My problem is actually that I simply don’t trust movies released under a heading of “This Number of Films to do Some Activity For” or “This Number of Films Will Cause You to Wet the Bed at Least This Number of Times”, and this one was released under “6 Films to Keep You Awake”.

Sweetie, now that you’ve impregnated me, I’m going to own you for the rest of your life.

However, I let my Spanish leanings towards The Orphanage eventually sway me away from a particular Korean flick I was eyeing and into this lovely little film directed by one Mr. Alex de la Iglesia, whose directing work some might know already from The Day of the Beast.

The Baby’s Room centers upon a Spanish family: Juan, Sonia, and their baby who they call “Fester” (but I’m not altogether sure if that was the actual name, a nickname, or a description).

See: owned.  Rest. Of. Your. Life.

As in most haunted house stories, the true starting event is them moving to a new (haunted) house.  (I say “true starting event” as there is a brief opening scene that, while neat and made sense overall, I think was underwhelming and could have done much more to establish the movie.)  Juan and Sonia are a truly happy, loving couple, full of tenderness and teasing as they work together on their new house and shower Fester with all the affection he’ll need growing up with a name like “Fester”.

However, the first night they sleep over in the house, Juan digs up a pair of baby monitors and stations one in the titular baby’s room and one in their bedroom (as putting it in the garage would have made *no* sense at all).  As they start to doze off, they hear Fester giggling over the monitor, which is followed by heavy breathing and, when Juan grabs the device, a suddenly angry and unintelligble male voice.  Juan  slowly gets up and walks to the baby’s room, grabbing a table leg on the way– but no one is in the room with his offspring.

I’ll admit that he does look like a “Fester”.

In American movies, things like this are dismissed the next day.  Oh, we were both tired.  Oh, it was the acid we dropped.  Oh, it’s just the neighbor’s porn channels being received.

This is not an American movie.

Juan goes to work and tells his boss that he’s late because his house is haunted.  There’s no level of disbelief or rationalization, his house is haunted and that’s the end of it.  The boss is less than impressed.

After work, Juan heads to a baby store (where you buy, you know, babies) and picks up a new monitor set– one with an infrared video camera so they can actually watch their baby sleep.  Juan wakes up in the middle of the night to see a strange, dark man leaning on Fester’s crib, which causes him to grab a nearby dinner knife and bolt into the nursery.

The eyes scare you?  What about me?!  GYAH!

Sonia is, shall we say, less than amused to wake up and see her husband hovering over their baby with a knife in his hand.  Relationship tension continues to mount from this point in the movie.

Paranoia begins to take over Juan’s brain, as not only does one of his coworkers start to feed into anxious possibilities, but the police that are summoned to inspect their house for a potential B&E are less than sympathetic to their mental state.

Basically, the policeman they question about their safety is like, oh yeah, thieves break into houses during the day and just hide and come out and night.  Yeah, sometimes they go into bedrooms and steal while the owners are sleeping.  You’re lucky you woke up, because sometimes they steal babies, too.

Very reassuring.

Anyway, after nearly being accidentally killed by Juan, Sonia decides to grab Baby Fester and head out of town for a bit.  While she’s gone, Juan’s psychological state continues downhill.

Here’s Juanny!

This rapid downhillery manifests in several ways, but the most important and freakiest of which was him buying several more infrared baby monitors once he realizes that they can “see” into the haunting.  Basically, he ends up running around the house with a baby monitor in such a way that caused certain parts of my body to clench in fear.

So, yeah, this movie repeatedly scared the crap out of me.  Yes, I’m a whuss and, as soon as the scene was over, I’d say to myself, “What the hell were you freaking out for?” or write things like “SO FUCKING DOOMED” on my notepad, but it was still scary.

Library field trip, yay!

As midnight rolled around, I started texting an ex-boyfriend.  Here’s our conversation:

AM: You up?

EX: Nope.

*minutes pass*

EX: Whyfor?

AM: This movie is terrifying the shit out of me.

EX: Aww.  Poor fragile Allison

AM: ‘Nother scary Spanish movie.

EX: Well, don’t worry… there’s probably nothing behind you.

AM: I hate you.

EX: I’m saying, odds are good that there’s nothing creepy outside.  That noise on the stairs is probably just a cat, so relax.

AM: AAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!!

EX: It wasn’t a cat?  You should go see what made that noise.

AM: WHY DO YOU SUCK SO MUCH?!

Scariness aside, the plot itself was fun.  Sure, it has been done before, but that didn’t make it any less interesting and it certainly didn’t spoil the ending for me– with movies like this, you can go a variety of different ways and, as far as I could tell, there was no real lean towards any one direction, no reveal to the ending, until the actual end, which I greatly appreciate.

Spoiler: Old people are crazy.

Also of note, this is the first time I’ve ever seen a movie use Schrodinger’s Cat to explain the paranormal, so total points for that.

If I was at all prone to assigning rating systems to movies, this would fall below the level of “I’m Going to Sleep in my Parents’ Bedroom with a Lit Up Glo-Worm Doll” but above the level of “Another Goddamned Paranormal Activity Movie”.

As always (always!), if you feel like following the adventures of a man who would call his kid Fester, this movie is available on Netflix on Demand.  Watch it, call me a pussy for being frightened, and design a drinking game around cultural differences in dealing with hauntings and bad decisions that ultimately cause the main character’s downfall.