More Mood Than Shiver

I'm not a big horror flick guy, but I love foreign films, so I watched "Shiver" (or "Eskalofrio" in Spain) the other day. The plot is pretty predictable -- light-sensitive kid moves to the mountains, people die, he becomes a suspect, turns out the monster's a psycho girl -- but the atmosphere is indeed terrifying. The movie appears to be set in a remote region of northern Spain called Asturias, a wet place of steep canyons and dark forests. The director, Isidro Ortiz, captures the insular dread of the setting perfectly. By the end of the flick, he also achieves his goal of making the dark a sanctuary. "I've tried in 'Eskalofrio' to build a horror thriller where the monsters are the heroes and where you must flee from the light to take refuge in the darkness," he wrote. "A back to front tale." That in itself is creepy.