The concept of the past is a sticky one—we expect it to stay put, but its tendency is to adhere to the feet and the fingers, to follow us back from the place we like to believe we have left it, to cling and to remain. To exist within a horror movie is to understand this. The past is persistent, as unwilling to lay down and die as any unkillable supervillain. Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger may all be representative of any one of a thousand things, depending on your outlook—proto-fascism, misogyny, Reaganomics, queerness, teen morality, to name but a few—but they are all, at their core, about the terrifying press of the past.
It would be fair to characterise the recent run of mainstream horror movies as being perhaps overly conscious of this dynamic. Between Smile, Smile 2, Trap, Longlegs and Baghead, one could be forgiven for thinking that horror in the year of our Lord 2024 is less a many-legged genre than it is simply the word trauma writ large across the back of a packet of cigarettes. But to decry the somewhat single-issue nature of this type of movie is, I think, to ignore the fact that trauma has always been one of the things that drives successful horror. From Marion Crane in Psycho onwards, horror protagonists have not only spent their movies running, but crucially started them that way. Running away—from a chequered past, from a man with a machete—is a thing horror protagonists do well and it is a path that has been followed by characters across eras and sub-genres.
Mike Flanagan is a filmmaker whose preoccupations tend towards the half-remembered. From The Haunting of Hill House to Doctor Sleep, his subject is that of the self as a necessarily haunted thing and the past as the creature doing the haunting. This is certainly true of his 2013 movie Oculus—a film I have found myself recommending over and over again at book events and online, always with the caveat that yes it is a movie about a magic mirror, but also probably art?
Oculus is a movie in which brother and sister Tim and Kaylie return to their childhood home to confront the terrible things that took place there. It is also a movie in which those terrible things take place, in real time, right in front of them. Taken as a linear piece of storytelling, Oculus operates along two timelines—the present and an extended flashback to the past working alongside one another—but in practice, the movie is a far more slippery viewing experience. Past and present move in tandem, with the actors who play the older and younger versions of the same siblings often positioned around the same soundstage, walking directly past each other, often close enough to touch. Sequences abound in which the twenty-something Kaylie (played by Karen Gillan) seems disturbed by the presence of her younger self (Annalise Basso), though whether the implication is that she can see her, or sense her, or is simply recalling her, is left up for interpretation. This is achieved, at times, with fairly simple camera trickery and a certain amount of stagework—scenes play out between the younger Kaylie and Tim (Garrett Ryan), only for the camera to pan around to Gillan as though she has been present, and watching, the entire time. At other points, this blurring effect is achieved with less overt theatricality, with cuts between scenes made in such a manner that the sound from one timeline bleeds across into another and the line between one scene and the other becomes unclear. In one particularly effective flashback sequence, the younger Kaylie and Tim crouch together in a bedroom, having witnessed something terrible, and the younger Kaylie says her brother’s name several times. As we watch, Basso’s voice becomes Gillan’s, and within the blink of an eye the scene has shifted, we are back in the present and the older Tim (Brenton Thwaites) is looking up at his sister, who is calling his name.
This temporal breakdown is, at once, metaphorical and very much a function of the movie’s central premise: Kaylie claims that their father’s antique mirror was supernaturally responsible for the collapse of perceived reality which led to her parents’ deaths, whereas her brother Tim believes the cause to have been firmly rooted in the material world—sustained spousal abuse, followed by a violent murder-suicide. For much of its runtime, the movie toes the line between these two realities, implying that its own unstable timeline could just as easily be the result of the mirror messing with perception, as with the stutter of a traumatised mind. Over the course of one night, the older Tim and Kaylie attempt to carry out Kaylie’s plan to capture the mirror’s influence on camera, only for the narrative to functionally override the characters’ intentions, becoming more unstable as the mirror’s apparent influence seems to grow. Time becomes elastic, characters hurtling between memory and hallucination, and the fact of the past becomes inextricable from the present, regardless of whether the past in question is genuine or imaginary. Flashback scenes play out in the past between the younger Tim and Kaylie, only for the camera to pan back to a shadowed figure in the background. We assume, this being a horror movie, that that figure is a ghost, only to find as the image resolves that it is in fact the older Tim or the older Kaylie watching their younger selves, that the reality of what we are witnessing has shifted again and that we have failed to keep up. As the movie progresses, this blurring becomes more overt, matching the speed and ferocity with which reality appears to be collapsing. Characters no longer seem to be watching or sensing one another as melding together and becoming one. In a late, and pivotal, scene, a young Kaylie is lured towards what she believes to be her mother, only for the audience to realise (too late) that what we have perceived to be the young Kaylie is actually the older Kaylie being led into a trap. The camera shifts from an image of the younger Kaylie being embraced by her mother, to an older Tim watching, and then back to Kaylie—except that now what we see is the older Kaylie, and now the thing that has happened to her is far, far worse.
Ghosts, in the Mike Flanagan multiverse, are very much a fact of life. Oculus is a precursor to Gerald’s Game, which is in turn is a precursor to The Haunting of Hill House, and to Doctor Sleep, and so on. In each movie or show, characters are freighted with pasts which manifest as a hand on the shoulder, an unpleasant reminder that there is no such thing as a great escape. The grown adults of Hill House can no more evade the memories of their dead mother than Danny Torrance in Doctor Sleep can move past his murderous (and almost convincingly Jack Nicholson-shaped) father. It is, I think, the main reason Flanagan is one of the only successful screen interpreters of Stephen King—a writer as obsessed with nostalgia as he is with the insidiousness of nostalgia, a giant in the genre of sentiment curdling into disgust.
Oculus, whilst not Flanagan’s first feature, is a perfect example of a filmmaker setting out his stall. It is, to be honest, my favourite Flanagan project (tied with Midnight Mass, and also The Haunting of Hill House, and also Ouija: Origin of Evil, and to be honest I could go on but I wouldn’t want to insult the grand tradition of choosing favourites). As a movie, it is impeccably slick, whilst also leaving space for the kind of crunchiness that allows a horror sequence to sing. The execution of the time-slip is impeccably wrought, but this is still very much a movie in which characters accidentally bite down on glass light bulbs and rip out their own fingernails with staple removers, and all the better for this nasty edge. It is a movie I have been known to recommend to friends in pursuit of the bouncy night-in vibe of a Final Destination, only to remember halfway in that it is in fact something very different. It is a movie I once insisted on showing to my wife, only to then force her to go to sleep in the room I was at that point renting, which happened to feature a wall-to-ceiling mirror, and I have no real excuse for that. It is a movie I will continue to recommend, and then forget about, and then recommend again, and whether this endless remembering and forgetting is due to my own brain problems or the malign influence of a magic mirror is impossible to unpick. As a movie, its strength lies in this impossibility—the fact of two characters trapped in a house that is and isn’t their pasts and simultaneously trapped in that house’s mirror image. In Oculus, the past is not only present, it’s standing right behind you, right in front of you, and staring right back.
