By Keri O’Shea
“Because no one has more thirst for earth, for blood, and for ferocious sexuality than the creatures who inhabit cold mirrors.” (Alejandra Pizarnik)
The mirror has a long, complex relationship with our culture, and so it’s little wonder that such a host of superstitions, anxieties and beliefs should have found their way into that great distorting mirror – horror – over the years. In many ways, the mirror is a simple commodity, one which has been present to a greater or lesser extent down through the centuries. However, it has long served as more than that; its ability to balance showing us the truth whilst presenting us with a world we cannot touch has long fascinated and appalled people. It shows us ‘another world’, one which has the illusion of depth and distance, but is beyond our bounds. No wonder a richness of folklore has sought to govern this uneasy, same-different space, particularly as, down through the centuries, one’s reflection became intermingled with notions of vanity.
Vanity, a sin, has traditionally (and does still for some) endanger the idea of the soul by encouraging a preoccupation with the corporeal and worldly; this explains why so many superstitions regarding mirrors relate to souls being somehow ‘trapped’ in the glass. I can still remember my great-grandmother in Wales explaining that if you show a baby its own reflection before it’s a year old, the mirror will ‘take its soul away’. Mirrors are still covered after bereavements in many parts of the world, and perhaps the best-known superstitious belief regarding the looking-glass (and one of the best-known superstitious beliefs still recognised) relates to what happens if you break one – seven years’ bad luck.
If souls can be trapped in mirrors, then it’s not difficult to see how another layer of folklore and belief can build upon these foundations, extending this view to consider what else mirrors might show us, and what this might mean. This could relate to other old folk-stories, such as one about seeing your future husband reflected over your shoulder in your looking-glass, if you fulfil certain conditions on certain nights of the year (Halloween/Samhain in particular, though be warned – you may also see the figure of death!) In a more malevolent vein, and one which has been exploited time and time again by horror cinema (see below) we’ve probably all heard of urban legends – folk stories in all but name – which tell of figures like ‘Bloody Mary’: again, here you fulfil certain conditions whilst looking into a mirror, usually chanting the name a set number of times, but a successful outcome means the apparition of a bloodied female spectre. There are lots of little variations, but the general lore is the same across countries and decades. The mirror is the key, and the outcome here is a fearful brand of the supernatural.
Many eminent occultists – by definition seeking that which is ‘hidden’ – have made use of the mirror, also in the wider sense of any suitable reflective surfaces, to attempt to gain knowledge, to see into the future, or to otherwise garner an understanding of the world that would otherwise be impossible to them. This practice is widely known as ‘scrying’, or ‘seeing’. We mostly associate this practice now with the ubiquitous crystal ball, but there has long been greater variety. Famous good news guy Nostradamus famously used a scrying mirror (actually a shallow bowl of water) to form his prophecies; the Elizabethan magician and adviser to Queen Elizabeth, Welshman John Dee, used an obsidian scrying mirror, now on display at the British Museum in London.
Reflective surfaces serve and have served multiple purposes, then: first they show us truths, then they seem to be showing us something unreal. They can be harmful, they can be hazardous, or they can be enlightening. All of these are things, of course, which have been said about cinema, which must have seemed like magic of its own at its inception.
Before we really come to talk about the mirrors of horror cinema on this whistle-stop tour, though, I’d like to divert briefly and mention some uses of mirrors in literature, as to me these foreshadow important and key developments in horror on the screen. The first of these is Snow White – best known as-written by the Brothers Grimm in 1812, but probably influenced by older European folk stories. In this story, we have an interesting bisection of vanity, cruelty – and magic, specifically a magic mirror. The wicked queen famously demands of the magic mirror in her possession, ‘Who is the fairest in the land?’ (this was changed to ‘fairest of them all’ in the Disney animated adaptation, probably to underline their Evil Queen’s more universal villainy). The magic mirror responds, and must respond, truthfully. So, when it finally answers that the queen is no longer the most beautiful, but that Snow White is, her injured vanity leads her to seek the child’s murder (asking for the child’s organs to be brought to her in several versions). Here, magic begets murder, or attempted murder.
Also of note is Lewis Carroll’s Through The Looking Glass (1871). No one has ever been able to convince me that Carroll’s best-known books aren’t horror stories. I know, I know. But I found them deeply unsettling as a child and I do as an adult, with Through the Looking Glass worse, somehow. Still, here we have a popular children’s book, one which is widely-recognised in the modern day, where a character crosses into a same-different world by clambering through a mirror. Once into this parallel and illogical world, things at first seem exactly the same, but the room contains different things, and then beyond that room, there’s a host of nonsensical characters. This idea of crossing into the world by using a mirror as a portal has been used to horrific effect in films (even if you think I’m mad for finding it pretty horrific here!)
Last, but not least, just prior to the rise and rise of cinema (so close that Stoker’s widow threatened Murnau with copyright infringement for his original screenplay of Nosferatu) Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) brings us back to this age-old anxiety about mirrors and souls. Whilst he wasn’t the first author to describe the belief that, being damned souls, vampires cast no reflection. As Jonathan Harker shaves using a small mirror in Castle Dracula, he is startled to observe that, although Count Dracula is standing right behind him, he cannot see him. He looks again…
“This time there could be no error, for the man was close to me, and I could see him over my shoulder. But there was no reflection of him in the mirror! The whole room behind me was displayed, but there was no sign of a man in it, except myself.”
Magic, parallel worlds which don’t follow our rules, and malevolent, damned souls. The scene is set for cinema to take up the reins…
Delusion, Revelation and Malevolence: a Selection from Horror Cinema
Now, this part of the article is not intended to be an exhaustive list of every use of mirrors in horror films. I’ve had to leave many out, and I’m sure there are some which I’ve forgotten outright, but the examples I’ve chosen to use are in here for two reasons. Firstly, I like them. I think they’re interestingly done and entertaining. Secondly, they relate to what we’ve discussed already.
So, to come back to the story of Dracula, here we have the basis of the first horror committed to celluloid, as well as the basis for one of our most recognisable boogeymen; the mirror motif from Stoker’s original story is frequently retained in filmed versions, as it is a pithy, early way in which the Count is shown to be not just abnormal, but supernatural. Coppola’s Dracula (1992) has divided audiences, but its shaving mirror scene is reasonably true to the book – if a little more overblown, with the mirror smashing into smithereens when the Count notices it.
Again returning to our earlier notion of scrying mirrors, Britain’s Hammer House of Horror made an interesting contribution with one of its episodes. ‘Guardian of the Abyss’ charted an attempt to raise the god of the abyss, Choronzon, through an occult ritual hinged upon scrying, via an unwitting innocent. The results show that some knowledge should be hidden…
One significant use of mirrors in horror is where it juxtaposes madness and clarity. Characters may be already moving away from the everyday, usually via exposure to the supernatural – an encounter with a mirror at this juncture both shakes them out of this state, and in so doing makes it worse. For instance, in The Shining (1973), Jack is already under the sway of the demonic residents of the Overlook Hotel when he’s called upon to check out Room 237. He duly goes, there encountering a nubile young woman who attempts to seduce him.
It’s only when he catches a glimpse of them both in the hotel room’s mirror that he sees something else. It’s not quite the truth, but it’s a different version of what he believes he is seeing. However maniacal he is by now, his horror at the revelation is very real.
At a similar midpoint between reason and madness – though wildly different in tone – is Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead II (1987). The premises are smaller but an unholy blend of demonic entities and isolation have taken their toll on Ash, the chief male protagonist. He desperately tries to get a hold of himself, telling his reflection in the mirror, “I’m fine…” His reflection, now its own beast and reaching out of the frame to grab him, begs to differ. “I don’t think so. We just cut up our girlfriend with a chainsaw. Does that sound fine?” In each case, the moment of clarity worsens the ordeal. Its existence drags each man further into their madness.
Certainly, mirrors themselves are plot devices in these examples, but in other horrors, they figure far more highly – asserting the central focus in the narratives. One of my absolute favourite of these actually forms part of a portmanteau horror, made by the good folk at Amicus. From Beyond the Grave (1974) features stories based around a mysterious antiques shop, and its proprietor (played brilliantly by Peter Cushing). The horror here can usually be attributed to the behaviour of each of the characters, giving the film something of a moralising tone, which means that the terrors which befall Edward Charlton are due to him misrepresenting the pedigree of an antique mirror in the shop, so that he can get it for a knockdown price. The resultant tale is The Gatecrasher: Charlton wishes to use the mirror for a ritual of his own, namely a seance – awakening an entity which demands that he kill so that it can ‘feed’. Whatever wrongs Charlton (David Warner) has committed up until this point, you can’t help but feel some pity for him as his ordeal breaks – and then transfigures – him. The mirror, hanging on his wall, is the alpha and omega of his sufferings, and we’re also shown that the ordeal is never going to be over. It’s a neat tale, but a devastating blend of magic, murder and arrogance: a horror tale which feels like an extension of a fairy tale where the bad and the vain perpetrate crimes, but also get punished.
In many ways, The Gatecrasher foreshadows the final film I’ll discuss here, although in the case of the final two films, each set of victims is somewhere between flawed and utterly blameless. Kiefer Sutherland’s character in Aja’s remake Mirrors (2008) is a broken man, but not a bad man. In trying to rebuild his life, he takes a job as a caretaker in a department store – and when he begins to see things in the building’s multitude of mirrored surfaces, his ex-wife assumes this is the result of his medication. He is hallucinating, nothing more. However, as he begins to uncover the story of the building, the entities in the glass show that they can harm people in the ‘real’ world by acting on, and as, their reflections. This is noteworthy, and in the film’s most shocking scene (the ‘jaw scene’ featured at the top of this page) a reflection takes on a life of its own, to murder someone by controlling their image. To me, this is the ultimate extension of fears about a mirror ‘stealing’ something from you, except this time it’s not the soul – it’s the body. It’s not a perfect film, but it’s an interesting one, and it extends the horror of mirrors to its furthest modern point.
Which brings me to the final film in this feature – Oculus (2013) (mild spoilers).
This is a film I saw only recently, but one which I think is an outstanding supernatural horror. It describes, through a sophisticated structure which flashes back to the childhood of the main characters throughout, siblings Kaylie (Karen Gillan) and Tim (Brenton Thwaites). We learn that a tragedy befell them; their father became abusive, and in an accident the eleven year old Tim shot and killed him after enduring too much. Tim was institutionalised after this incident, but ten years have passed. When we meet him in adulthood, he has come to terms with it enough to be considered rehabilitated. However, on his release, he talks about the event with his sister and realises that they have very different takes on what happened that night, and in the weeks which led up to it. Kaylie is adamant that the presence in the home of an antique mirror was somehow behind what happened to them. More so, she has procured the mirror in an auction, and intends to prove her version. The results of her labours expand upon the story of their childhood and also, to my mind, craft an impressively sinister horror tale, in which the mirror is again key.
Oculus, the inspiration behind this article, merges all the anxieties and beliefs about mirrors discussed so far, weaving them into an original and gripping tale. It uses urban legends, beliefs about unnatural and sinister occult powers (though by intimation, another strength of the film) and shows us a mirror – an artifact – through which you can travel or from which others can come. It is a gateway to a dangerous place, and crucially, it is a home to lost souls, brought right up to date and given a brutal, modern feel. This makes it one of the best films of the year, what I feel is a superb development on our theme and a fitting point at which to end this feature.