Genre: Horror
Premise: A woman tries to exonerate her brother, who was convicted of murder, by proving that the crime was committed by a supernatural mirror.
About: Oculus is the newest movie from horror kingpin, Blumhouse Productions. Everyone who made the film (writers and directors) are fairly new to the business. The film came out in theaters this weekend and finished third at the box office, with around 12 million dollars (behind Captain America and Rio 2). Coolest thing about Oculus? Definitely not the movie itself. But rather Rory Cochrane, who played the iconic Ron Slater in the classic Dazed and Confused, starred as the father in the film.
Writers: Mike Flanagan and Jeff Howard (based on a short screenplay by Mike Flanagan and Jeff Seidman)
Details: 105 minutes
Rory Cochrane in Oculus
Blumhouse is an interesting story. For a long time in Hollywood, people were making 20-40 million dollar horror films. If you were lucky, those films would make 70 million at the box office, and then some more money on DVD. Blumhouse came in and said, “There’s gotta be a better way to do this.”
How? Well, scaring people doesn’t take a big budget. It just takes a good concept and a smart script. So they started making these movies budgeted at under 5 million dollars, that were still getting those 70 million dollar box office returns (or more!). All of a sudden your profit was 65 milllion dollars instead of 30. Paranormal Activity, Insidious, The Purge, Sinister are a few of the films that have benefited from this model.
This approach really shook the industry up. Why make big-budget horror movies anymore? We can just give Blumhouse a few million bucks and print money. Blumhouse might as well of called itself Powerhouse.
That is until today. Today, Blumhouse proved why its model is imperfect, exposing a big challenge in writing these kinds of films. I’ll get to that in a sec. But for those who didn’t see the film this weekend, here’s a recap.
Oculus follows a brother and a sister who experienced one hell of a shitty childhood together. When Kaylie and Tim were young, their father (whose job is still a mystery to me) worked in his office at home, where (for reasons that are still a mystery to me) he’s purchased a really really really old mirror that doesn’t go with the rest of the office at all.
Kaylie and Tim watch as this mirror starts to possess their father, which in turn drives their mother mad. In order to save himself and his sister, little Tim is forced to kill his dad at just 10 years old. But that’s not the main storyline. The main storyline actually takes place 11 years later, with Tim finally being released from the mental institution he’s been rehabilitated at, as he is now deemed fit for society.
When he meets up with his sister for the first time in forever, he thinks they’re going to go bowling or grab a big mac or something. Instead, she tells him they’re fulfilling their promise from when they were kids – to destroy the mirror that possessed their dad.
Tim is shocked to find that Kaylie still owns their parents’ house after all this time (which makes zero real-world sense, of course), and actually HAS THE MIRROR. She’s set up a bunch of monitoring equipment throughout the house so she can document what happens and prove the truth – that the mirror possessed their dad and made him crazy.
The problem is, during the past 11 years, Tim has been brainwashed by the world’s best psychiatrists, who’ve told him that everything he experienced in that house was his imagination. That the mirror wasn’t evil or possessed at all. Tim was just a deranged boy. So Tim is trying to convince Kaylie that she’s nuts.
While all of this is happening, flashbacks are inserted to show us just what happened with Dad and the mirror that fateful summer. We already know he and the mom were killed, but the writers want us to know how. And therefore, we get a sort of dual-storyline, 60% present, 40% past, which all takes place in this house, with this mirror.
Rory Cochrane in Dazed and Confused!
What is the worst mistake a horror movie can make?
Anyone?
Anyone?
NOT BEING SCARY.
Oculus is a horror movie and it isn’t even scary! It’s just two young adults talking to each other for 90 minutes. When you write a horror movie, scary needs to be a given. On top of that, scary movies need that one huge super memorable scary freaking moment that you know audiences will be talking about afterwards. In The Ring it’s when the girl climbs out of the TV (amongst other things). In The Exorcist, it’s when the girl’s head spins around. In Rosemary’s Baby, it’s the rape dream. What is it here?
It’s not even that it didn’t have this scene that bothered me. It’s that it DIDN’T EVEN TRY TO HAVE ONE. There wasn’t even an attempt. It was all just a bunch of talking and dumb jump scares.
But anyway, here’s the problem when you try to make the 5 million dollar horror movie. When you make the 5 million dollar horror movie, you have to limit your locations heavily. You usually get one big location, maybe a few early outside shots to imply a bigger world, and that’s it.
So if you look at all of the Blumhouse movies, they almost all take place exclusively at one home. Now if you have a solid premise, like, say, The Purge, this can work. But when your premise is thin, you’re screwed. You’re already making it tough on yourself by giving an audience only 5 rooms to spend the entire movie in. Now you tell them that you don’t have much to do in those rooms??
I have no idea how Oculus was approached as a story, but I can take a guess. They had this idea of this brother and sister and a mirror in a house, and as they started to construct a plot around it, they realized they didn’t have enough story. Again, this is the danger you run into with the Blumhouse approach. One location = only so many story options.
So they said, “Hmm, we need to add more story somewhere.” And that’s when someone came up with the brilliant idea: “Why don’t we spend half the movie in flashbacks seeing what happened to the family when the kids were younger?”
As soon as I picked up on that, I knew the story was dead. If you’re spending that much time in the past, it means you don’t have enough of a story for the present. Think about it. We didn’t need a SINGLE flashback for this story to work. We would’ve always understood what was going on in the present without it. So what was the point of adding it? The only logical answer is “to fill up space.”
You never want to only FILL UP SPACE when writing a script. A story should feel like it’s bursting with possibilities, like there isn’t enough time to tell it all. I guarantee you, if you’re using flashbacks to elongate your story, the audience will feel it, and they’ll start getting bored, which is exactly what happened here.
I’m not sure if this exposed the Blumhouse model for the house of cards it is, or if we’ve just reiterated something we’ve known about screenwriting forever: A weak concept will always result in a weak script. I mean WHAT IS THIS ABOUT??? A mirror that sort of possesses people (but maybe not) and also makes people imagine things?? So two people try to “kill it?” Are you kidding me?? Throw if off a cliff. Story over.
Here’s another way to easily tell if a script is going to suck: One of the characters spends TEN CONSECUTIVE MINUTES talking to another character with nothing but exposition (as Kaylie does to Tim when they come back to the house). There are only two possibilities for why anyone would do this. One, they’re not a good enough writer to know how to hide exposition. Or two, they’re trying to add as many pages as possible to get to the minimum run time for a feature. Neither scenario ever results in anything good.
Anyway, this script, at least when it’s watched as a film, is really bad. It’s one of the more disappointing films I’ve seen in the last calendar year.
[x] what the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Screenwriting 101 – Make use of your premise! This is a script about a mirror. But there were NO MIRROR-RELATED SCENES! Actually, check that. There was one. That didn’t have anything to do with the story (it actually takes place before they even get to the house). It’d be like if you wrote Ghostbusters and there was one ghost. It was baffling. Here’s a tip: If you write a movie like Oculus, and you can substitute ANYTHING for the mirror (a haunted record player, a haunted table, a haunted painting) and it would still be the exact same movie, then you’ve done a terrible job writing that movie.
