As only a passing fan of the horror movies, my interest in any particular example of them usually starts and stops with the gimmick. True genre diehards have the toolset to distinguish the subtle reworking of slasher tropes that, to a layperson like myself, just seem repetitive. Scary movies have always struck me as too experiential (the currency of the experience usual being: did this freak me out?), so I approach them a lot like action movies: enjoy the ride, but finding anything of value under the surface is going to require a lot of digging on your part.
So as rides go, I will say that I rather enjoyed this year’s Oculus, largely because the hook it was playing with was one I hadn’t seen before. “Brother and sister try to kill spooky mirror” isn’t all that compelling on paper, as far as premises or antagonistic furniture go, but writer-director Mike Flanagan has a few tricks up his sleeve. The most compelling is the self-awareness the film’s protagonists, who survived their parent’s possession by the mirror’s influence as children, bring to the table. Karen Gillan’s Kaylie is the opposite of a Final Girl: she actively chooses to confront whatever it is that’s hiding in the antique mirror. Also great, is that in the years since plotting her revenge against it, she’s probably watched a few horror movies herself. When she drags her mental ward-released brother to their old house to face down the malicious mirror, she takes every precaution one could conceive of to both catalogue the demon’s activities, and scupper them.
The horror genre has always depended on the audience distancing themselves from the film’s victims by showing how completely incompetent they are, and therefore, how deserving of a machete to the face they will be. But competence is one of the most endearing traits a movie character can have. It’s fun to watch smart people be good at cool shit. By having a protagonist that’s not only generally intelligent, but also hip to the tricks of the type of film she’s in, Kaylie stands out as a character instead of just cannon fodder (Gillan’s flimsy American accent, mind you, will at times leave you thinking you’re watching the darkest Dr. Who episode ever).
Of course, by raising the IQ of his playthings and boxing himself in so tightly, Flanagan basically has to cheat to get to the usual horror movie beats. Oculus walks a fine line between formal experiment and outright copout with its use of unreliable camera narration, as entire scenes are retconned to prove what you were just watching didn’t really happen. It’s a cheap trick, really, but Flanagan validates it through the clever intertwined narrative of the film, which sees flashbacks to the childhoods of Kaylie and her brother weave in and out of their present circumstances.
As reality and fantasy, past and present get more and more tangled, you’ll be left uncertain of whether you can trust any of what you’re watching, or how it is we got to a particular point of action, but the effect puts a unique spin on otherwise standard material. Oculus isn’t a particularly scary film, but it does have layers of family and psychological horror that are unnerving. It also backs them up with a protagonist who, both as a child and adult, shows the kind of wit and courage we should all aspire to the next time we find ourselves haunted by occult fixtures.