Have you ever noticed Mike Flanagan and Paul Rudd have nearly identical voices? Weird. Anyway, when you think of modern horror maestros, his name pops up frequently among the most popular—Flanagan, not Paul Rudd, though if you enjoy his performance as Tommy Doyle in Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers, more power to you. Mike Flanagan has perfected a unique subgenre of horror that blends horror elements with legit dramatic storytelling. It sounds like an obvious concept, a scary story that puts equal or greater focus on character and story as it does disturbing imagery, but Flanagan puts such a heavy emphasis on well-rounded characters and their relevance to the narrative you could take out the horror element from many of his shows and films and still have an engaging story. At this point, he’s so on top of his game and well-liked by critics and audiences alike; it’s hard to believe that Oculus, his first major film, was released only a decade ago—or eleven years, for all of you TIFF release date loyalists. While not his directorial debut—that distinction belongs to Absentia, released in 2011—Oculus was Flanagan’s first studio-funded production. The film was produced through multiple production companies, the two most notable being Blumhouse and WWE Studios…That’s right, your eyes are working just fine. It’s weird that a post-PG Era WWE would want to be associated with a disturbing horror film, but you can’t argue with the result.
The film follows Kaylie (Karen Gillan) and Tim (Brenton Thwaites), two adult siblings who reunite after Tim is released from a mental institution, having spent the last decade going through psychiatric treatment to get rid of the delusion that their dysfunctional parents (Katee Sackhoff and Rory Cochrane) were killed due to the influence of a mirror in their father’s home office. Kaylie, having spent the last ten years thoroughly convinced that what they experienced in their youth was the truth, makes them return to their childhood home to finally destroy the mirror and prove that the supernatural force surrounding it is real, with the story alternating between the past and present. The continuing debate between the siblings is whether that supernatural experience was real or just a means to suppress the trauma of their father killing both himself and their mother. Not in that order.
If you haven’t seen the movie in a while, or haven’t seen it, period, based on the core premise of the story, you would think it would be a lousy haunting movie. To be honest, a haunted mirror isn’t that far off from a haunted swimming pool, and if you watch the original trailer, it doesn’t look that different from any other throwaway horror movie. However, upon revisiting, not only is it better than a standard haunting movie—it easily could’ve just rode off the success of the Insidious franchise, and people still probably would’ve seen it—but the film also plants the seeds of themes and stylistic choices that Flanagan would expand upon and be perfected in later projects. If Midnight Mass and Gerald’s Game are sandcastles, Oculus is Flanagan acquiring piles of sand and buckets of water.
A running theme across most of Mike Flanagan’s work is family dysfunction, specifically related to father figures. Now, this wasn’t some artistic coping mechanism to deal with childhood issues; if anything, it was the opposite. As he’s mentioned across different appearances on multiple podcasts, Flanagan grew up in a stable household and had a happy childhood, which ironically instilled a fear of loss of the stability and structure of a happy home life. That underlying fear is echoed throughout most of his work—maybe less so in Hush, but while we’re on the subject, how great is it that it’s finally getting a Blu-ray release? Support physical media.
The familial element that often gets the most scrutiny is father figures, who are frequently shown to be either unreliable, destructive, detached, or just flat-out dangerous. You’ve got Henry Thomas as a well-meaning but disconnected father to Riley in Midnight Mass and then Henry Thomas as the ghost of Jack Torrence in Doctor Sleep. Then you have…Henry Thomas, again, as the manipulative father in Gerald’s Game, and also the dad in The Haunting of Hill House—okay, maybe it’s not so much ‘fathers’ as much as it is Flanagan’s subconscious distrust of Thomas as a parent. There’s a story there. At least Sheriff Hassan (Rahul Kohli) was cool and actively tried to keep his son from willingly drinking rat poison, which shouldn’t be a difficult task, but as everyone knows, if Matthew from The New Adventures of Old Christine tells you to do something, you do as you’re told….though if it was Jerry Dantana, that’s when you wait to hear all the facts (Hi, Hamish Linklater!).
This distrust of patriarchal figures in the family unit was established in Oculus with Rory Cochrane as Alan. The character seems emblematic of Flanagan’s love of Stephen King since his slow decay into madness feels reminiscent of Jack Torrence in The Shining—more so the film adaptation’s depiction of the character—he starts as a decent enough guy but quickly becomes consumed by the supernatural force that’s affecting the family. By the time the climax comes around and he’s practically a personification of the evil force that surrounds the mirror and actively goes after the siblings, the fear doesn’t necessarily come from him flaying a gun around and letting their ceramic plate-eating mother loose—who at that point looks identical to Zelda from Pet Sematary—the fear comes from the kids having to be on their own. Their parents are the ones who should be shielding them from monsters, but now, they are the monsters.
The parents’ decaying mental state also showcases another ongoing theme throughout Flanagan’s work: Addiction. His personal experience with alcoholism is well-established, and it’s showcased most notably in Doctor Sleep and especially Midnight Mass, showing an empathetic perspective on the struggles of addiction and the ongoing challenges of sobriety. In Oculus, however, addiction is shown purely as destructive and harmful to yourself and the people around you. His later projects feel like a reflection on what it’s like after getting over to the other side of sobriety, whereas here, it’s felt more like an observation of it as it’s happening. The father’s relationship with the mirror is first depicted as an affair, with the ghost of Marisol seducing him, but by the end, he’s just staring into it, presumably for hours on end, like he needs to be in its presence, and ignoring his family’s well-being. If you want a more literal example, when the mother, Marie, believes that her husband is having an affair, she stops eating and starts heavily drinking wine to cope with her marriage falling apart. They both turn to their vices, and ultimately, the kids are the ones who suffer the most from it…then again, Alan’s fingernails fall out, and Marie ends up with a stomach full of plate, so pretty much everyone gets to the finish line of the experience with a silver medal (i.e., the worst medal, according to Jerry Seinfeld).
If there’s one thing Mike Flanagan loves to do, it’s to write dialogue, and especially monologues. So much so that when Midnight Mass was released, it was chastised on the internet for his over-reliance on them. An argument could be made that you can have too much of a good thing—though, personally, the monologues were never an issue—but Flanagan has put in his 10,000 hours of practice. His dialogue often has the most staying power in the films and series he creates, and, not to rinse and repeat, but that all started here with Kaylie’s monologue and eventual debate with Tim about the history of the mirror and the legitimacy of how it relates to what they experienced as kids. You wouldn’t think that someone rambling about the customer history of a mirror would be as captivating as it is, but something like Antiques Roadshow would be far more exciting as delivered by Karen Gillan and scripted by Mike Flanagan. However, unlike later projects where he puts a camera down (or on a dolly) and lets the actor go to work, the monologue here is cut like a scene of Liam Neeson hopping over a fence, which was a deliberate decision by Flanagan (as mentioned in his appearance on Inside of You with Michael Rosenbaum) since he wanted to be sure he kept the audience’s attention for a multi-page monologue, so in hindsight, it shows off Flanagan’s growth and eventual trust in his skills as a screenwriter that he can keep his audience engrossed in the story.
As mentioned earlier, the two siblings have spent the remainder of their childhoods into adulthood with two widely different perceptions of what happened to them. This leads to multiple Rashomon-like scenarios of their different perceptions of what happened. Kaylie believes their father was seduced by a ghost from the mirror, and Tim believes he was having an affair. Kaylie thinks the mirror absorbed their dog, and Tim believes he was put down because he was sick. This leads to a recurring idea in much of Flanagan’s work—the debate of rationality versus belief.
“Belief” in this context doesn’t necessarily mean in a spiritual sense—though Flanagan’s work has covered that—but rather any form of ideology or personal conviction. This is where his work as a writer is the most compelling, and it might just be a personal preference, but these are the scenes that elevate Flanagan’s material above that of other horror filmmakers. He’s not afraid to let a scene breathe and have two characters put their cards on the table and call it as they see it.
There’s the discussion in Doctor Sleep between Dan (Ewan McGregor) and the ghost of Jack Torrence (played by father of the year, Henry Thomas) with Dan struggling with his sobriety and how alcohol shaped his life, all the while Jack is telling him that it’s the cure-all to life’s problems. There’s Gerald’s Game, where Jessie (Carla Gugino) tries desperately to hold to the idea that her husband (Bruce Greenwood) is a good man; all the while, her subconscious projection of him keeps proving that he absolutely is not. By the time you get to Midnight Mass, every AA meeting between Riley (Zach Gilford), an ironclad atheist, and Father Paul (Hamish Linklater), a man whose job title revolves entirely around his faith, becomes a debate about the malicious capacity of humans and the existence of God. As excellent as all those scenes are, it all starts with Kaylie, Tim, and the mirror. Kaylie has done her homework on the mirror’s history and finds details that led to circumstances identical to what they experienced as kids. Meanwhile, Tim brings to light completely legitimate evidence to support the idea of causation and correlation and how she’s reaching to connect events that could be completely unrelated. This may be a horror movie, but that set piece turns that home office into a courtroom, and Tim and Kaylie become the defense and prosecutor, respectively.
This is a little off-topic at this point, but remember way back, like 953 words ago, when we were talking about the real monsters of the story? Let’s go back in time to when that was still relevant to the discussion; time is a construct anyway. So, okay, on top of the thematic monsters of the story—the parents—there’s also the literal monsters of the story, which is technically the mirror, but in this case, it’s the mirror ghosts that surround it. Their existence set the precedent of Mike Flanagan’s fascination with antagonistic threats with visually distinct eyes. Have you ever noticed that? People don’t talk about it much, but he does it all the time. There’s the mom’s glowing eyes in The Haunting of Hill House and the possessed Doris’ white eyes in Ouija: Origin of Evil, you’ve got the Moonlight Man’s eclipse-lit eyes in Gerald’s Game, and the vampires in both Midnight Mass and Doctor Sleep that have that Voight-Kampff effect in their pupils when their vampire senses are tingling. That all started with the mirror ghosts and their reflective, pupil-less eyes. And what, you may ask, is the meaning behind this recurring visual? Something, probably. That’s for sure.
Returning to Oculus is an interesting experience if you haven’t seen it in some time because it acts almost as a proof-of-concept for the style that Flanagan would flesh out over multiple shows and movies. The stylistic choices of the parallel past and present story structure and adult siblings dealing with past trauma and having real-world psychological problems like sleep paralysis or night terrors make the film feel like a trial run for The Haunting of Hill House—down to the fact that Kate Siegel is in both of them. It also demonstrates his growth and trust in his skills as a filmmaker and storyteller. A couple of moments feel like it’s trying a bit too hard to be a “spooky” scary movie, like the violent horror of Alan accidentally ripping his fingernail off with a staple remover, Kaylie eating a light bulb, and the incredibly bleak ending.
The latter feels the most unusual, considering Flanagan usually goes for, if not happy, at least hopeful endings—some people say it’s to his detriment, like in the case of the ending of Gerald’s Game. In the context of Oculus, it still works and feels honest to the story’s tone, but for a Mike Flanagan story, it’s pretty jarring. Regardless, for a sophomore outing and a first run in the big leagues, Oculus laid the groundwork for the path that would lead Mike Flanagan to be one of the great modern filmmakers in both horror and filmmaking in general. It showcased his skills as a dialogue writer, the haunting nature of his horror, and the human element of his characters. Any weaker aspects of the film would be ironed out in later projects, and its fantastic elements would be expanded upon and elevated to even greater heights.
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