Summary
Terribly dull even by the usual standards, “Something’s Knocking at the Door” is as run-of-the-mill as ghost stories get.
This recap of Haunted: Latin America episode 4, “Something’s Knocking at the Door”, contains spoilers.
Even in such a terrible, fraudulent show, “Something’s Knocking at the Door” stands out as the weakest installment. It’s terribly dull, wheeling out one cliche after another, and not even bothering to tie anything together with any underlying folklore or subtext. There isn’t even a conclusion, really, which is supposed to be the point and where some of the lasting emotional power comes from, but I was too bored to care about Diego Ruiz and the weird smoke monster that he insists haunts him to this day.
As a child in Mexico City, Diego apparently saw the corpse of a neighbour who had jumped to his death from the penthouse of the apartment building in which he lived. I can believe that, and I can also imagine it’d cause a child to imagine all sorts, so perhaps the root cause of all the “hauntings” is just his way of processing that trauma. That doesn’t explain how it supposedly haunts others who also live in the apartment building, but whatever. It’s the only thing that makes sense in the entire episode.
Years after that incident, Diego’s father purchases the penthouse and they move into it. Young Diego obviously sensed “a presence” that appears in the background of one of the reenactment shots as the ruined corpse of the previous owner, but for the rest of Haunted: Latin America episode 4, it appears as a wispy, cheap-looking smoke monster.
It’s difficult to overstate how uninteresting this is. Electronics start playing up, someone may or may not climb onto Diego’s bunk beds. He develops night terrors and begins barely sleeping, which I suppose would also contribute to weird visions and such, but nobody raises that possibility. Diego’s father eventually gets cancer, a man in the apartment below dies, and someone — or something! — begins incessantly knocking on the door at night, despite the hallway’s motion sensors not picking anything up. Eventually, Diego, frustrated, yanks the door open, and the smoke critter just nips inside, which is unintentionally hilarious.
There’s no real conclusion to “Something’s Knocking at the Door”. At one point a pastor rolls through and a load of crosses get hung up and drawn in oil on the wall. The smoke monster returns regardless, and apparently never went away. What it finds so interesting about Diego is anyone’s guess.
