Editorials
Reflecting on Marina Sargenti’s Teenage Horror ‘Mirror Mirror’ [Young Blood]
No genre harnesses the mystery and power of mirrors more than horror. Characters are at their most vulnerable and honest when they stand before these reflective surfaces, preening and unmasking. Yet they never consider if someone or something could be watching them from the other side of the mirror.
Hidden among a mass of direct-to-video releases in the very early ’90s was Marina Sargenti’s debut Mirror Mirror (originally titled The Black Glass), which had a limited theatrical release after premiering at Cannes. The central story begins after a flashback shows Mary Weatherworth (Traci Lee Gold) sacrificing her sister Elizabeth (Michelle Gold) in front of a mirror. In the present day, Megan Gordon (Rainbow Harvest) has moved to a small Iowa town from Los Angeles along with her mercurial mother, Susan (Karen Black). They have no idea about what happened in this house back in the 1950s, yet they do find something left behind by the past residents: the same full-length mirror from the opening scene. It somehow found its way back home after being removed by an auctioneer played by Yvonne De Carlo. The realtor, Mrs. Perfili (Ann Hearn), allows Susan to then buy the mirror for Megan, unaware of what horrible fate awaits her.
On her first day of school, Megan makes a scene by running out of class. Neither mean girl Charleen (Charlie Spradling) nor the teacher (Stephen Tobolowsky) are very welcoming to the new student. Going forward, Megan’s arrival is treated like an omen. Charleen and the rest of the school all have a visceral reaction to Megan, who looks like she stepped out of a dark-wave music video. Someone so unafraid of expressing themselves is bound to get under the skin of those who act and dress accordingly just so they can avoid standing out.
Megan’s father died a few months ago, but her grief garners no sympathy from anyone other than Charleen’s rival, Nikki (Kristin Dattilo). Mrs. Perfili nudges Nikki in Megan’s direction, and the two become fast and genuine friends in spite of their differences. Herein lies a strength of Sargenti’s film: the female relationships. Foremost is Megan and Nikki’s friendship, which admittedly echoes that of Carrie White and Sue Snell from Stephen King’s seminal coming-of-age horror, Carrie. Surface similarities aside, Nikki is less inclined than Sue to make the outcast fit in; she accepts Megan as she is. Also, Nikki’s actions are not driven by a guilty conscience. While everyone, including her boyfriend Ron (Ricky Paull Goldin), wants nothing to do with the “strange” new kid, Nikki continues to show up for Megan regardless of the growing danger involved.
Megan and her mother are polar opposites. Megan is closed off; Susan is colorful and open. The mother maintains a long-distance psychiatrist to help her through this difficult period of her life, whereas Megan bottles everything up and uses her Gothic guise as a sort of armor to keep others at bay, including her mother. Megan is constantly dressed for a funeral while Susan is dressed for life. The list goes on. However, Megan and Susan’s relationship is strained only because of their divergent reactions to Mr. Gordon’s death. Megan secretly wants her mother’s attention, and Susan resorts to other forms of healing before realizing what she needed all along was her daughter.
Karen Black’s presence might suggest Mirror Mirror is camp, but the horror icon turned in a fairly moderate performance where eccentricities manifest through wigs and fashion rather than excessive delivery of dialogue. Black’s versatility suits someone like Susan, a flighty mother who does not always ponder her daughter, yet can become warm and maternal in the blink of an eye.
As her sorrow grows, Megan seeks comfort from an unexpected source: the ominous mirror in her bedroom. The body-sized accessory is fixed and inconspicuous; naturally no one suspects it of all the bizarre murders happening around Megan. When alone with the mirror though, Megan is seduced by its power. She indeed knows the object is channeling her emotions and making her dark wishes come true, but Megan is not the villain here. She is in thrall to the mirror because it makes her feel good after what seems like a lifetime of feeling bad and ignored. Nikki also provides a similar kind of pleasure, so Megan is willing to do whatever it takes to keep both her best friend and the mirror in her life.
Megan’s sudden makeover is a manifestation of what she wants to see in the mirror rather than the timid teenager she calls ugly. To others this new change is fearsome. Charleen’s boyfriend Jeff (Tom Bresnahan) is attracted to Megan at first sight, but once she sheds her wallflower persona and is more take-charge with her sexuality, he ultimately loses interest (and his life). Susan can no longer neglect the fact that her daughter is changing, and Megan’s revamping comes as a reminder about life’s fleetingness and her own maternal responsibilities. Finally, Nikki, whose friction with Charleen partly comes from her resentment of everyone’s attraction to her, initially wants to stop this new Megan. She finds her friend’s awakening intimidating. In the end, during a bizarre conclusion that will perhaps leave viewers baffled, Nikki begs the mirror to put everything “back the way it was” because she herself is not ready for change.
The film’s proximity to that first major burst of teenage horror makes Mirror Mirror feel more at home with the likes of Christine, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II than anything coming out in or shortly after 1990. Young characters finding their way in the world while battling supernatural afflictions was a staple of ’80s horror, but the formula was less prevalent in subsequent years. Everything eventually changed down the line, and ideas deemed old-fashioned would become fresh again with a few simple tweaks and updates. It just goes to show how ahead of the curve Mirror Mirror was.
Mirror Mirror is deserving of its status as a hidden gem. Marina Sargenti’s first feature boasts a predominantly female main cast with a film crew to match, and it combines the Female Gothic with classic teen-horror elements. Both the supernatural and psychological mythologies of mirrors are explored to some degree here, with Megan’s interiority being the most ably examined by the director and the writers. Mirror Mirror is marketed as a mere revenge tale of instant wish fulfillment gone awry, but its underlying themes are also worth reflecting on.
Horror contemplates in great detail how young people handle inordinate situations and all of life’s unexpected challenges. While the genre forces characters of every age to face their fears, it is especially interested in how youths might fare in life-or-death scenarios.
The column Young Blood is dedicated to horror stories for and about teenagers, as well as other young folks on the brink of terror.
Due to a complex series of anthropological mishaps, the Wayans Brothers are a huge deal in Brazil. Around these parts, White Chicks is considered a national treasure by a lot of people, so it stands to reason that Brazilian audiences would continue to accompany the Wayans’ comedic output long after North America had stopped taking them seriously as comedic titans.
This is the only reason why I originally watched Michael Tiddes and Marlon Wayans’ 2013 horror spoof A Haunted House – appropriately known as “Paranormal Inactivity” in South America – despite having abandoned this kind of movie shortly after the excellent Scary Movie 3. However, to my complete and utter amazement, I found myself mostly enjoying this unhinged parody of Found Footage films almost as much as the iconic spoofs that spear-headed the genre during the 2000s. And with Paramount having recently announced a reboot of the Scary Movie franchise, I think this is the perfect time to revisit the divisive humor of A Haunted House and maybe figure out why this kind of film hasn’t been popular in a long time.
Before we had memes and internet personalities to make fun of movie tropes for free on the internet, parody movies had been entertaining audiences with meta-humor since the very dawn of cinema. And since the genre attracted large audiences without the need for a serious budget, it made sense for studios to encourage parodies of their own productions – which is precisely what happened with Miramax when they commissioned a parody of the Scream franchise, the original Scary Movie.
The unprecedented success of the spoof (especially overseas) led to a series of sequels, spin-offs and rip-offs that came along throughout the 2000s. While some of these were still quite funny (I have a soft spot for 2008’s Superhero Movie), they ended up flooding the market much like the Guitar Hero games that plagued video game stores during that same timeframe.
You could really confuse someone by editing this scene into Paranormal Activity.
Of course, that didn’t stop Tiddes and Marlon Wayans from wanting to make another spoof meant to lampoon a sub-genre that had been mostly overlooked by the Scary Movie series – namely the second wave of Found Footage films inspired by Paranormal Activity. Wayans actually had an easier time than usual funding the picture due to the project’s Found Footage presentation, with the format allowing for a lower budget without compromising box office appeal.
In the finished film, we’re presented with supposedly real footage recovered from the home of Malcom Johnson (Wayans). The recordings themselves depict a series of unexplainable events that begin to plague his home when Kisha Davis (Essence Atkins) decides to move in, with the couple slowly realizing that the difficulties of a shared life are no match for demonic shenanigans.
In practice, this means that viewers are subjected to a series of familiar scares subverted by wacky hijinks, with the flick featuring everything from a humorous recreation of the iconic fan-camera from Paranormal Activity 3 to bizarre dance numbers replacing Katy’s late-night trances from Oren Peli’s original movie.
Your enjoyment of these antics will obviously depend on how accepting you are of Wayans’ patented brand of crass comedy. From advanced potty humor to some exaggerated racial commentary – including a clever moment where Malcom actually attempts to move out of the titular haunted house because he’s not white enough to deal with the haunting – it’s not all that surprising that the flick wound up with a 10% rating on Rotten Tomatoes despite making a killing at the box office.
However, while this isn’t my preferred kind of humor, I think the inherent limitations of Found Footage ended up curtailing the usual excesses present in this kind of parody, with the filmmakers being forced to focus on character-based comedy and a smaller scale story. This is why I mostly appreciate the love-hate rapport between Kisha and Malcom even if it wouldn’t translate to a healthy relationship in real life.
Of course, the jokes themselves can also be pretty entertaining on their own, with cartoony gags like the ghost getting high with the protagonists (complete with smoke-filled invisible lungs) and a series of silly The Exorcist homages towards the end of the movie. The major issue here is that these legitimately funny and genre-specific jokes are often accompanied by repetitive attempts at low-brow humor that you could find in any other cheap comedy.
Not a good idea.
Not only are some of these painfully drawn out “jokes” incredibly unfunny, but they can also be remarkably offensive in some cases. There are some pretty insensitive allusions to sexual assault here, as well as a collection of secondary characters defined by negative racial stereotypes (even though I chuckled heartily when the Latina maid was revealed to have been faking her poor English the entire time).
Cinephiles often claim that increasingly sloppy writing led to audiences giving up on spoof movies, but the fact is that many of the more beloved examples of the genre contain some of the same issues as later films like A Haunted House – it’s just that we as an audience have (mostly) grown up and are now demanding more from our comedy. However, this isn’t the case everywhere, as – much like the Elves from Lord of the Rings – spoof movies never really died, they simply diminished.
A Haunted House made so much money that they immediately started working on a second one that released the following year (to even worse reviews), and the same team would later collaborate once again on yet another spoof, 50 Shades of Black. This kind of film clearly still exists and still makes a lot of money (especially here in Brazil), they just don’t have the same cultural impact that they used to in a pre-social-media-humor world.
At the end of the day, A Haunted House is no comedic masterpiece, failing to live up to the laugh-out-loud thrills of films like Scary Movie 3, but it’s also not the trainwreck that most critics made it out to be back in 2013. Comedy is extremely subjective, and while the raunchy humor behind this flick definitely isn’t for everyone, I still think that this satirical romp is mostly harmless fun that might entertain Found Footage fans that don’t take themselves too seriously.
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