Afflicted (2014)

Afflicted takes the tired found-footage label and jolts it back to life by grounding its horror in the easy, believable chemistry of two friends chasing a last big adventure across Europe—until the camera becomes their only way to make sense of something terrifyingly wrong. What makes it special is how inventively it turns travelogue energy into escalating dread, building suspense through small, plausible moments that snowball into breathless set pieces you can almost feel in your ribs. The filmmaking is scrappy in the best way: technically adept, cleverly staged, and surprisingly effective with its low-budget tricks, so the fear feels immediate rather than manufactured. If you’re allergic to shaky-cam or need neat, polished scares, it may not be your style—but if you want an exciting, relentlessly tense ride that earns its shocks, this one sticks the landing.

Afflicted is trying to mash a travelogue buddy-doc vibe with a grounded, “what if this really happened?” body-horror descent, and on a craft level it often delivers—there are a few genuinely tense, inventive sequences that make smart use of the found-footage format. The problem is it can feel more like a well-made effects and escalation reel than a story you’ll emotionally latch onto, with character beats that lean on genre basics instead of digging deeper. If you’re tired of familiar vampire-adjacent turns, shaky-cam chaos, or you’re sensitive to a treatment of women that can feel thin and somewhat exploitative, this may grate rather than thrill. Still, if you want a brisk, nasty, high-energy horror-thriller that keeps raising the stakes and doesn’t overthink itself, it’s a solid time-waster.