Ruidos en la noche
2018 · 12m · España
Directed by José Ruiz Anagaru, Sergio
Genres: documentary, horror, mystery
Paranormal-events programme Ruidos en la noche tells of two siblings who share a house with an entity from another dimension for years. The programme team launches an intensive investigation into the haunting.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Most people see 'paranormal investigation' and think found-footage jump-scares; Ruidos en la noche flips it by using the *format* of a paranormal TV show as its actual structure, collapsing the line between entertainment and terror in a way that feels genuinely unsettling rather than cute. The siblings living with an interdimensional entity for years—not fighting it, just *cohabiting*—is the kind of premise that makes you realize horror stopped being interested in that question decades ago.
The film's formal choice to situate itself within the documentary-as-investigation tradition creates a meta-textual rigor that recalls found-footage's lineage while interrogating the genre's own appetite for spectacle; the measured pacing and restraint in revealing the haunting shows considerable discipline in resisting the sensational impulse.
The decision to make the 'investigation team' the actual narrative engine—their methodology and skepticism becoming the dramatic tension rather than the entity itself—is what transforms this from genre exercise into something with real weight, and it's accomplished with almost no special effects, just smart structural editing that lets the mundane and the inexplicable rub against each other.