WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Oculus and The Fall of the House of Usher.
Of all the horror creators currently working in the business, few have the ability to tear at our heartstrings like Mike Flanagan. Beginning with the 2018 hit miniseries The Haunting of Hill House, the director’s horrific Netflix shows are just as likely to elicit cathartic sobs as hysterical screams. However, with a cast of unlikeable characters and a cavalcade of grisly deaths, Flanagan’s newest series The Fall of the House of Usher may signal a return to the grim horror of his early career. Films like Absentia, Hush, and Ouija: Original of Evil all center harsh and unforgiving stories – a gut punch rather than a bittersweet embrace. Perhaps the cruelest of these is Oculus, the 2013 story of a haunted mirror. Ten years after its premiere, this nihilistic movie still feels like a lean and mean trip to hell more akin to the Usher family’s fate than anything found within the walls of Hill House or Bly Manor.
Inspired by Poe’s eerie short story, Flanagan’s The Fall of the House of Usher follows an ultra-wealthy family of entrepreneurs guided by twins Roderick (Bruce Greenwood) and Madeline Usher (Mary McDonnell). Finally facing prosecution for decades of misdeeds, Roderick’s adult children begin to die in gruesome accidents as the wealthy dynasty collapses on itself. Told in parallel timelines, we watch the destruction of this powerful clan alongside flashbacks that slowly reveal the twins’ original corruption. In the last days of their lives, the Usher family reveals their true colors, peeling back the illusion of glamorous power they’ve projected to the world. Part eat-the-rich fantasy and part anti-capitalist satire, Flanagan has a ball with these narcissistic characters who can’t help but tear themselves and their loved ones apart.
More tragedy than black humor, Oculus also features a family struggling with blurred reality. The film takes its title from the Lasser Glass, a sinister mirror capable of shifting perceptions and driving its victims to shocking acts of violence. A decade after the gruesome deaths of their parents, adult siblings Tim (Brenton Thwaites) and Kaylie Russell (Karen Gillan) document a dangerous plan to destroy the expensive antique, but soon find themselves pulled into its sinister circle. As in Usher, their futile attempts to save themselves from an otherworldly force unfold alongside flashbacks to the original horror. We watch the young Russell family self-destruct as the reflective surface wreaks havoc on their collective reality.
In the earlier timeline, father Alan Russell (Rory Cochrane) buys the ornate mirror to hang on the wall of his new home office. No sooner has the young family moved in than the glass begins its campaign of terror. Plants start to die and the family dog comes down with an unknown disease. Alan spends long hours alone under the mirror’s watchful eye, withdrawing from his wife and lashing out at his children. Already insecure about her husband’s affections, Marie (Katee Sackhoff) begins to unravel as well. The Lasser Glass distorts the appearance of her C-section scar and creates the illusion that Alan has been unfaithful. As her paranoia grows, she becomes possessed with the antique’s murderous spirit and attempts to strangle her children. Alan succumbs to its force as well and responds by isolating and torturing his wife. Watching on in horror, young Tim (Garrett Ryan) and Kaylie (Annalise Basso) try to seek help outside the house, but find themselves trapped by the mirror’s powerful influence.
Compared to early scenes of a more or less happy family, this dissolution of parental bonds feels especially vicious. Though Kaylie has planned for every trick the mirror may throw at them, she has not accounted for the weight of reliving this extreme childhood trauma. Walking through their former home, the siblings stumble upon horrific memories and once again find themselves hunted by their own parents as the mirror’s many ghosts emerge. The timelines knit themselves together and it becomes nearly impossible to tell reality from the mirror’s projections. One harrowing scene sees Kaylie defend herself against her mother’s ghost only to discover she’s actually killed her fiancé. Unable to tell perception from fact, she must look through the lens of a phone camera to determine whether his bleeding body is actually real. Flanagan builds an unnerving dual reality and the audience finds themselves just as lost as the Russell children.
Flanagan uses the mirror’s unnerving tactics to flex his impressive gore muscles. The director has always had a flair for the gruesome and an uncanny knack for striking at our most vulnerable points. Later films would see him destroy a series of onscreen hands including a nearly unwatchable degloving scene in his 2017 film Gerald’s Game. In Oculus, Flanagan zeroes in on the sensitive skin inside our mouths with characters biting into light bulbs and ceramic plates while blood drips from their lacerated lips. Not only do we begin the story with a gun to a child’s head, we also see brutal crime scene photos and hear the details of grisly deaths left in the mirror’s wake. Kaylie tells us that one victim systematically used a hammer to smash all the bones in her body and another drowned her children believing she was tucking them into bed. Foreshadowing the blood-soaked Usher, Flanagan holds nothing back and twists the knives in his characters’ backs.
Compared to his later more sentimental horror, Oculus presents a particularly nihilistic conclusion. Young Tim must save his sister by shooting his father in the chest. In a brief moment of clarity, Alan encourages his son to pull the trigger and free him from the mirror’s grasp. In the present day timeline, Flanagan plays with our emotions by allowing us to hope that the adult siblings might find a way to defeat the mirror. But this is not to be. In an especially devious twist, Kaylie sees a vision of her mother calling to her from the other side of the glass. Meanwhile, Tim remembers the moment of his father’s death and flips the “kill switch” designed to destroy the mirror. He releases a massive anchor mounted in the ceiling only to find his sister standing between the blade and the glass. Once again Tim is responsible for killing another member of his family.
As the timelines merge together, Flanagan hits us with this dual devastation. Both versions of Tim are dragged away by police raving about the sinister mirror. All his hard work in therapy has been for nothing and he is likely headed back to psychiatric care. Kaylie watches her brother go in both timelines, though the endings to her stories dramatically differ. Young Kaylie will be left alone to fend for herself while adult Kaylie has become forever trapped inside the mirror’s world. The only consolation is that she joins her parents in this alternate dimension, but all three will be doomed to haunt the glass’s next home.
It’s a particularly nihilistic conclusion for a creator who specializes in uplifting horror. Flanagan excels in creating stylish, but devastating portraits of death. However, more often than not his stories end on an uplifting note. The Haunting of Hill House gives us “confetti,” a beautiful metaphor for the experience of life while The Haunting of Bly Manor closes with a meditation on lost love over Sheryl Crow’s gorgeous “I Shall Believe.” Even Midnight Mass concludes with the citizens of Crockett Island singing together as the sun rises. But Oculus ends with a family destroyed. The Lasser Glass has shattered their bonds of love and left them to suffer amidst the broken glass.
Flanagan flirts with this nihilism in Usher, though he still manages to wring out a bit of sympathy for the unlikeable family. Roderick and his line may die as a result of their own hubris, but the results of their greed will echo through the ages. Not only will the pain they’ve caused outlive them, but another greedy family will likely take their place. Tim and Roderick both watch their families crumble knowing their attempts to save them have been futile. One has brought this misery on himself while the other is an innocent victim, but both stories paint a picture of a cold world and the dangerous contrast between perception and reality. Though they differ in tone, the brutality of Oculus and The Fall of the House of Usher show that sometimes we can’t find our way out of the darkness and some families are simply destined to fall.
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