In the past decade there has been a scarcity of horror or terror movies. Either you get the pseudo-horror crap that are nothing more than a special effects festival laden with quasi-big name actors, or pretentious thrillers that don't even bother trying to scare anybody and are content throwing cliche after cliche at the audience for the required hour and forty minutes.
It is rarely that you find a movie that will transmit any sort of tension. Some don't quite gel together but manage to create a sense of dread based on imagery and situations, rather than hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on animating some CGI baddie. Sometimes you find horror from the way that the beasts in the movie are not even close in ruthlessness to the humans in it; sometimes there's suspense on the sheer uncertainty of just what in god's name is going on, on wondering if the characters are going insane. Most of these successful films understand that older movies not only were able to scare you but have held over the years because instead of focusing on the latest technical advancement for their effects, or the most recent hip trend for their characters, they focused on creating a foreboding, oppressive atmosphere that manages to make you feel that even if you're only watching a movie, even if what the characters are going through will probably never happen to you personally, were you in their shoes you wouldn't be able to act any different. They have the same sense of inevitability that a squirrel must feel when it gazes into a snake's eyes, petrified, unable to just climb away into safety.
Enter The Eye.
You've seen the theme before. Something happens to main character, she starts seeing ghosts, must find out what's causing it in order to rest. Yes, it's an old theme. The Eye is executed with such mastery, however, wielding tension like an ammonia-laced scalpel calmly slashing across your eyelid, which you can't resist opening, that the only other recent movie that I can remember creating a similar feeling in me was 1999's Stir of Echoes. The Pang brothers use camera angles, image focus and sound with the millimetric precision of a nightmare where you know what's behind you and you yell to your muscles to turn, but they just won't obey, and you know what's going to happen, can see what's coming, and still can't help the goosebumps, the hole in the stomach, the knotted forehead and clenched jaw, the shallow breathing, until it is all released when you jump in your seat, or squirm in it, or it just drains out of you with a sigh of relief, which you know won't last long.
It is to The Sixth Sense what Perfect Blue is to the Bugs and Daffy Show. If you enjoy ghost stories, at the very least you should go out and rent it.
Posted by Ricardo at March 29, 2004 11:29 AM