Summer of Netflix Day 64 - Oculus

Joel: What makes this movie work is the confidence that the movie has in itself and its ability to scare the audience. It’s very easy for a horror movies to use a loud, sudden piano bang when a monster jumps at the screen to give a quick jolt to the audience, but that’s not really impressive. What’s much more impressive, and much harder to accomplish, is a spooky, uncomfortable vibe that goes through the movie, keeping the audience tense so that feeling of genuine fear is present. Oculus has very few if any of those jump scares. Instead, it opts to take advantage of a disjointed narrative that weaves two separate stories from two separate time periods together to keep the audience enraptured with the movie. Going back and forth between the two times as freely as the movie does give you a distorted perception of reality, much like the one that the main characters are experiencing throughout the movie. It’s scary, and unnerving to watch. It’s not always easy for a movie to accomplish those goals and that’s why we so frequently see movies resort to the less impressive but easier to accomplish jump scare. But not only does the movie trust itself to be scary, it really is. Never did the movie jump out and scare me to give that quick feeling of panic fear, but when the movie was over I didn’t want to turn the TV off because then the room would be dark. And the movie was scary.

Also, I don’t want to drag a previous movie that we’ve seen back into the discussion too much, but I do need to mention this. An evil mirror as the main villain is just about as dumb of an idea as an evil tire. But on one hand we have a movie that’s too cool to even try and make a good movie, because all movies are dumb right? And here we have a movie that’s really giving it a go and doing what they can with the idea of a haunted but inanimate mirror. And it totally works. The movie is tense and unnerving. And even if it wasn’t, you know what? At least they tried.

Jason: Being a big Doctor Who fan, I was excited when I heard about this movie. I like Karen Gillan and her cute Scottish accent. I was a little disappointed to find she was using an American accent in this movie (which is a bit spotty in places and her register is much lower than her normal speaking voice) I think she really has some acting chops. Upon starting this movie, the very first thing that caught my eye was the WWE logo. They have really been branching out from their usual stuff in the past few years and some of it hasn’t been crap! Plus, this didn’t have a single wrestler in it. Come to find out, they only picked up distribution rights after the whole movie had been made, but still, pretty cool publicity for a pretty good horror movie.

There have been so many attempts at supernatural horror in recent years and a lot of it has fallen flat. The Paranormal Activity movies are laughable when they aren’t being completely boring. Insidious might as well have been a comedy directed by M. Night Shyamalammadingdong. But I felt that this really nailed it. The jumps from present to past were jarring and unsettling and really added to the complete chaos that the two main character were going through. And often, they aren’t jumps at all but a melding of the two timelines into one confusing, disjointed narrative. The continuity of the kids was well done, as well. The children bear a striking resemblance to the adults. Actually, I think the boy has played the younger version of the older guy in a couple different movies. And one part I really found interesting and unique: at the beginning, there are several jump scares that are not accompanied by the traditional blast of creepy music. This is a method that is not employed enough  in modern horror film. The appearance of a terrifying spirit would not be announced with a burst of trumpets and strings if you were to encounter it in reality. I think it adds to the overall atmosphere when we, as viewers, are allowed to determine what is scary.

Overall, this is a cerebral romp through the psychology or repressed memories and what could actually be the truth behind the clinical mumbo jumbo our society seems to think solves all personality flaws.  I enjoyed it immensely.

Chris: I hate the horror genre, I really do and I get that it’s simply a disconnect that I personally have and not to say that every horror movie is horrible because I don’t think Oculus is horrible, It’s actually not bad as a movie. I will say this, my own horror genre prejudices aside, I found the ending dissatisfying and not in a “leave ‘em wanting more” kind of way but in a, “hey, you made me sit through all these unanswered questions with absolutely no resolution.” And of course, I’m going to get those “the movie wants you to come to your own conclusion” responses and to that, no, incorrect, try again. See, movies like Inception has a certain degree of resolution and then introduces one tiny little wrinkle that forces the audience to go “wait, what?” but there’s still some degree of resolution. Oculus left you with many questions with no answers and that’s not compelling or intellectually stimulating, it’s simply bad storytelling. All that aside, I knew I’d find a way to put a WWE studios movie in this series before it was over.