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Veronica, the Spanish horror movie, hit Netflix and viewers were immediately hooked.

Critics and Netflix fans alike raved about it, heralding Paco Plaza, it's director, as a genius for creating what is being dubbed 'the scariest horror movie ever'.

Fright fans will remember Paco of course as the director of REC in 2007.

While Veronica is slightly different to REC, it is no less impressive. So why is everyone freaking out?

Telling the story of a young girl, who has to raise her younger siblings as her mother is absent, it takes familiar horror tropes and adds a dose of reality.

What’s it about?

(Image: Netflix/Sony Pictures)

Young Veronica and her friends take a break from looking after the siblings and mess about with the Ouija board during a solar eclipse - worse time, who knew?

Trying to summon the spirit of a dead friend's ex, they accidentally disturb the spirit of her dead father - and then something, or rather someone, else.

The movie has all the usual things from lurking in the shadows to things skittering about, objects moving and a blind nun.

It premiered at the Toronto Film Festival last year to rave reviews, but has only just come to Netflix.

The real hook though is the fact you don't know what is real and what is not, playing with reality in such a way it unsettles you enough to make you question everything.

Mainly, why would you play with a Ouija board? It NEVER ends well.

Is Veronica based on a true story? Yes!

(Image: Netflix/Sony Pictures)

The film is supposedly based on a true story taken from Madrid's police files in the 90s.

The film’s credits roll over a frightened call to the police, the titles letting us know that what we seen is based on a real story. That's not so unusual, many movies end with 'based on a true story', but how close is Veronica to the truth?

The events all took place in 1992 when a young girl in Vallecas, south Madrid, was briefly hospitalised and died.

It all starts with three friends playing with a Ouija board and ends three days later with Jose Pedro Negri, a police detective entering a house to find it full of strange smells and noises leaving him disturbed.

It is said to be the only time the word ‘unexplained’ marks a police file.

The film fills in what happened in that three day span. With little to go on Paco’s movie plays with the facts, or rather, fills the gaps.

(Image: Netflix/Sony Pictures)

Veronica is a dutiful daughter, filling in the mother role as her own mum is always working.

She's shown as the perfect daughter, dutiful and caring, but that just makes her ripe for posession.

One day she invites her friends Rosa and Diana over after they buy an occult magazine. Getting out the Ouija board they plan to contact Diana’s boyfriend who died in a motorcycle crash.

It turns out calling the dead is a little more complicated and speed dial isn’t exactly an option.

Instead of a casual chat with the ex, the girls end up contacting Veronica’s father.

There’s the normal horror tropes; the glass breaks on the board, objects take on a life of their own, red stuff pours from Veronica’s mouth (it’s actually meatballs she ate for tea) and a blind cigarette smoking nun turns up.

(Image: Netflix/Sony Pictures)

Sister Narcisco is merely here to explain what is going on and how they can reverse it. Of course, we will never know if she's what the girls think they saw.

When Veronica wakes up screaming the doctor tells her she has low blood pressure and asks a series of question, one being whether she’s menstruating yet - because of course a girl with a bed covered in blood must be on her period.

We’re well used to these horror set pieces, but here’s what’s interesting - we don’t know whether Veronica is creating this reality or if it’s in fact reality itself. Those three days are still a mystery.

Is this her imagination? What is “real”?

We may never know what happened beyond the girls' misjudged want to talk to Diana’s ex, but what we do know is the detective Jose was just as stumped and disturbed as viewers feel when the end credits roll.

After all the unknown is far more terrifying than tangible reality.