|
|
 |
 I
can clearly remember my initial experiences with horror
movies. The first one occurred when I was about four years
old, watching some weird film on TV with my mother about
a skinny girl with long, straight, light-colored hair
was walking around covered in red paint (well, to my young
mind it was red paint) while a building burned behind
her. I asked my mom what it was. "Carrie," she
replied. "Hey! That's my name too!" I said  with
a grin, more impressed by the character's name than anything
else. Needless to say, it didn't scare me much (although
that was more due to the fact that I didn't understand
it!) It wasn't until eight years later that I got back
into these films with classics like the original Invisible
Man and The Fly, which freaked me out for some
reason.
The
most memorable experience I had was when I went to see
the Blair Witch Project, which, at the time, hadn't
yet been definitively proven false. I almost didn't make
it through the movie, I was so scared. I remember gripping
the sides of my seat thinking, "If this isn't over
soon, I'm getting up and leaving." For me, the thing
that made it so scary was the implied elements of terror
that built up suspense; the characters find all of the
marks and indicators that they will die like the victims
they've studied. I kept expecting some sort of bloody
Boogeyman to jump out from behind a tree and start hacking
everyone apart. It never happened, but the suspense and
tension were so thick it was almost palpable. It took
me quite awhile to shake off that experience.
Now,
several years and many films later, I came across Oculus,
from director Mike Flanagan, and again felt that almost
tangible apprehension and delicious terror.
The
story of Oculus is that of Tim Russel (played by
Livelihood's
Scott Graham), an obsessed researcher conducting a
potentially fatal experiment. He has located and obtained
a large, ornate mirror that once belonged to his parents,
and which he believes is in some insidious way responsible
for their deaths, as well as the horrific deaths of the
rest of its previous owners. To prove his theory, he locks
himself in a bare room with the mirror, three video cameras
and monitors, food, water, a few alarm clocks, and two
phones (a cell and a land line). Then he waits.
As
he waits, he begins to explain to the cameras the history
of the mirror and what happened to each of its owners:
one dies of dehydration while sitting in a tub full of
water for three days, another shatters her own bones with
a hammer, another chews through a live electrical wire…
the list goes on and on. As time creeps by (we're never
sure exactly how much time passes), Tim conducts various
experiments to "test" the mirror, but in spite
of all of the numerous precautions he's taken, we see
him slowly descend into delusion before finally succumbing
to the mirror himself.
|
|
|
|
