How Oculus (2013) Did Horror Right
Mike Flanagan’s Oculus may be passed over by some horror fanatics as yet another film about a creepy ghost that inhabits a mysterious object, but that’s where they’d be dead wrong. As the protagonist Kaylie (Karen Gillan) attempts to prove her brother Tim’s (Brenton Thwaites) innocence in the murder of their parents, she recovers the haunted mirror that once resided in their home, believing it to be the cause of their deaths. The 2013 film is nuanced in its style, however, as it merges the minds of its often highly analytical fans of the genre with Kaylie’s thorough plan to beat the mirror at its own game. Because the mirror is able to change one’s conception of reality, causing hallucinations, confusion, injury, and death, Kaylie comes prepared with her own set of traps.
She boasts to Tim about her multiple video cameras to document the mirror’s activity (and keep track of their own), multiple analog timers set to change the camera’s tapes, eat, and drink, and individual thermostats for each room that will alert the pair if the temperature fluctuates even 5 degrees. The final trap has to be the cleverest, though, as anyone who tries to break the mirror either fails or dies. To combat this, she intends to destroy the object using a weaponized 20-pound anchor strapped to the ceiling, attached to a timer that, if not reset every thirty minutes, will release and smash into the mirror, shattering it completely.
This intelligent and detailed plan seems fool-proof, which makes what follows all the more terrifying. Most horror movies don’t truly get to people because, for lack of a better word, the protagonists tend to be idiots. They’re careless, take almost zero precautions, and make terrible decisions, invoking a sense of comfort because we as viewers can say “oh, I would have done that differently”, and in that way, we couldn’t fall prey to the monster behind the screen. In this film, however, director Mike Flanagan has already thought of every possible solution before you can, creating this feeling of doom and powerlessness as the events of Oculus go down. As the mirror fights through all of Kaylie’s defenses, Tim panics and activates the anchor to end it all, but the mirror beats them a final time, using Kaylie as a body shield by drawing her in close with visions of her mother, reaching out for a hug. Unlike most other victims in horror films, it was precisely her careful planning that eventually caused her demise, leaving viewers with the haunting question; “what could I have possibly done differently?"
