I purchased the horror film Mirrors, starring Keifer Sutherland as a down-and-out New York City police detective who discovers some very odd, then horrible, things happening in the mirrors of a burned-out department store where he works a night watchman.
On one level, the movie is so trite and cliche-ridden, it makes the viewer yawn, from the whole "struggling alcoholic ex-cop on the outs with his wife" to the "I'm not crazy I'm really seeing this stuff!" dialogue. On another level, it relies on a recurring theme - mirrors as portals through which evil entities can enter our world. John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness used this particular bit, as did the Keanu Reeves movie Constantine. In Mirrors, a young girl misdiagnosed as schizophrenic is forced by a therapist to sit in a round room of mirrors, described as an "experimental therapy". Of course, the girl is actually possessed, and somehow the demon is trapped in the mirrors.
The hospital is closed after a bizarre and horrific mass murder, and turned in to a department store, which was burned five years prior. A security guard is convicted on the crime, but insists in testimony that "the mirrors did it". The film opens, in fact, with a man running through the Lenox Ave. subway stop, breaking in to a locked room, only to have his mirror image slash its throat; the man dies (of course) as the mirror image watches.
So, on one level the film offers pretty traditional horror-film stuff. There is one scene, however - the murder of Sutherland's long-suffering sister (with whom he rooms as he tries to get his life put back together) by her mirror image - that is probably the most gruesome scene I have ever watched in a main-stream horror movie. What is even more surprising than the scene itself is that it doesn't come across as gratuitous. I was glad, however, I wasn't eating when the scene came on.
There are some obvious scenes designed to make the viewer jump is surprise, and even though one is dragged by the nose to them, they are done so well I jumped even though I knew they were coming.
The most arresting scene in the movie, however, is one in which Sutherland's estranged wife, calling their son out of his room (where he had been sitting cross-legged talking to his mirror; previous scenes had established that whatever possessed the mirrors at the department store had migrated to his bedroom); he gets up and we peer over her shoulder as his reflection stays seated, staring at her. That scene still gives me chills.
I bought the film because (a) I enjoy horror films, even predictable ones; and (b) for all that they are nothing more than "glass and silver" as Sutherland's doomed sister says, mirrors are an intriguing thing to me. Late Victorian/Edwardian occultist Aleister Crowley, it is said, spent decades attempting to make his image disappear from mirrors. In a world and culture in which images of all sorts flicker around us, we are taught to trust images with the use of mirrors. Yet, mirror images are not trustworthy. They are a reversal of reality. Our trust in our reflected image is misplaced. Adding to the issue of trust in images comes the weird (to me, anyway) juxtaposition of a film, which is nothing more than 24-still-fames-per-second flashing before our eyes, about the possibility that images are not trustworthy. Film is the most malleable medium available. Actors portray people they are not, indeed people who have never existed. They have their features changed by makeup and prosthetics. The lighting and sound is artificial; even the setting is usually artificial, said artificiality enhanced these days by computer technology.
The funny thing is that, when I was younger, I wondered about the relationship between mirrors and reality. We stand and look in a mirror, and we see the images of object behind us. We learned, early in life, that these images are accurate representations of the world around us, only backwards. Yet, how is that possible? How is it possible that a mirror shows us what we cannot, on our own, see?
Of course, physics has the answer to this question, and I accept that answer, which makes my own somewhat philosophical wonderment at mirrors and their images silly. Mirrors are, indeed, nothing more than silver and glass; the images are nothing more than light reflections.
The next time you are standing there, shaving, brushing your hair or teeth, making sure your collar is straight and turned out, just remember - nothing is looking back at you.
Maybe.
