re-post from now-dead blog. originally posted 10/16/09
Today in one of my classes I saw the movie Anguish (1987) and it had an interesting effect on me. I thought it was a very unique movie and one of the few movies that honestly scared me (well, one that wasn't for the body horror, anyway. body horror is usually the only thing that really does it for me.)
I want to explain what I found so interesting about it, but I can't really do that without spoiling the whole movie. This movie is most interesting when it hits you by surprise. It's also something you can really only see in a theater or a theater-like environment in order to get the full effect. So, I really only recommend you watch this in an auditorium or something on a projector, but I highly recommend this movie. If you think you'll ever have a chance to see it, and within a theater-like environment, for gods' sake please don't read on, I don't want to spoil this for you. If you don't think you'll ever see it, or just don't care, read the rest of this post. But this is my long-ass spoiler warning because I hate getting things spoiled for me.
-----spoilers! stop reading this post.-----
The film starts out as weird tale about an awkward optometrist with a mommy-complex. He kills people, because she hypnotizes him to do so. Nothing that original.
We then see young people in a movie theater, watching the same horror movie at the same time. The movie we just began to see for the first 15 minutes or so was "The Mommy", the film-within-the-film, apparently. The next half of the movie basically switches between the reaction of the young people in the theater watching "The Mommy" and the actual movie "The Mommy". One young girl in the theater is terrified and disgusted by the movie and eventually becomes affected strangely and is bothered both emotionally and physically.
At this point I was already feeling scared. As a kid I learned to not be afraid of horror movies by reminding myself that it's just a movie, those are just actors, no one is in any real danger and this never happened, and if it did happen its unlikely to happen here 'cause I'm just a kid sitting comfortably in my living room. This movie, though, used this reasoning against me I guess. I thought that "The Mommy" was the actual movie, so I was not threatened by it because it's just a movie. Once it started showing the people in the theater, though, they seemed real, because they were outside the 'movie'. They were reacting to the movie with me, seeing what I see, watching what I'm watching. Staring at their reactions was like looking at myself. a reflection. I began to identify with the main protagonist.
Then in Anguish, someone in the theater was hypnotized by watching "The Mommy" movie (one too many times), and went crazy and started silently killing off people in the theater one-by-one. The film still alternates between the murders in the movie theater and the movie they were watching, "The Mommy". Then in "The Mommy", our optometrist killer goes to A MOVIE THEATER and starts stalking and silently killing people there one-by-one.
So I was watching a movie in which people were being killed off while watching a movie, in which people were being killed while watching a movie..
!!
By this point I was looking around the lecture hall that I was in, making sure no one was being creepy, or dead. I also periodically made sure the person next to me(my boyfriend) was alive. I knew logically that we were in no real danger, but I just felt safer making sure. Better safe than sorr--DEAD.
ALSO THE MOVIE MENTIONS SPIRALS A WHOLE LOT AND I THINK THAT'S BADASS BECAUSE I LOVE UZUMAKI SHOUTOUTZ TO JUNJI ITO ♥
P.S. We survived, I think.
