Editorials
Happy 20th Anniversary to ‘Copycat!’
October 27th brings us the 20th anniversary of the oft-forgotten thriller* Copycat, starring Sigourney Weaver, Holly Hunter, Dermot Mulroney and Harry Connick, Jr. Released in 1995 at the tail-end of copycats (sorry) of The Silence of the Lambs, Copycat tends to slip by in discussions of great serial killer thrillers, since Scream would come out a year later and overshadow most 90s slashers that came before it. Not that Copycat is necessarily a slasher, but you’re more likely to find someone who has never heard of Copycat over someone who has never heard of Scream of The Silence of the Lambs, and that’s just not right.
*Before you cry “But Copycat isn’t a horror film,” please allow me to direct you to Jonathan’s post right here. If The Silence of the Lambs can be considered horror, so can Copycat.
***SPOILERS of a 20-year-old film to follow***
In Copycat, an attack by serial killer Daryll Lee Cullum (Harry Connick, Jr.) renders renowned criminal psychologist Helen Hudson (Sigourney Weaver) an agoraphobic. Thirteen months after the attack, a different serial killer begins to copycat some of the most notorious serial killers of the century. With the help of Inspector M.J. Monahan (Holly Hunter) and her partner Reuben Goetz (Dermot Mulroney), they work together to track the copycat before he can kill more people.
What makes Copycat such a special film is that unlike so many other films in the genre, it avoids gender stereotypes. The women are the stars of the show and they are capable of taking care of themselves. Even Weaver’s character, who is relegated to her apartment for 90% of the film, is portrayed as a strong female, despite her handicap.
Copycat’s parallels with The Silence of the Lambs are apparent. In Copycat, Monahan but use the help of an incarcerated expert on criminals and psychopaths (Weaver) to help her solve a crime, just as Clarice Starling had to utilize the help of Hannibal Lecter. Copycat’s twist on this plot is to have the incarcerated intellectual be female and not a criminal. Monahan is also a seasoned police inspector compared to the rookie Clarice Starling. To my knowledge (and I could be wrong), this is the first film to feature two women law enforcement officers working together to take down the villain. Dermot Mulroney’s Goetz is the sidekick and rookie in this film, and he gets killed at the end of the second act by a random criminal in the police station.
The Silence of the Lambs isn’t the only film that influenced Copycat. Wait Until Dark, the 1967 Audrey Hepburn thriller in which she is confined to her apartment because of her blindness. Helen’s agoraphobia directly parallels Hepburn’s character’s vision impairment.
Copycat was a type of feminist movie that no one had ever seen before, which makes it unfathomable that it isn’t name-dropped in film discussions more often. Its influence can be seen even in films like The Heat. Hell, the film even has a gay character whose sexual orientationis barely mentioned, which isn’t even something that’s common in films that are released today.
While the feminist ideals and the chemistry between the two leads is a major selling point of Copycat, the film has so much more going for it. Directed by John Amiel (who would go on to direct critical darlings Entrapment and The Core), Copycat features stella performances from everyone in the cast. Connick, Jr. has never been creepier, Mulroney is great as the junior detective and even William McNamara plays a great villain you love to hate.
Part of the fun of Copycat is the crime scenes. Watching the film plays like a “Greatest Hits” edition of America’s most notorious serial killers. From The Boston Strangler to Son of Sam to Ted Bundy, Copycat hits all the major players. While it is very much a cop movie, the film features the psychological elements much more prominently, making it a more compelling film.
There are disturbing moments aplenty in the film (though nothing particularly gory), the primary one being the opening sequence of Connick’s attack on Weaver, but there are severed fingers left in books, ants set loose in a bed, a really creepy animated email video and the climactic showdown between Helen and the titular copycat. Twists and turns feature prominently in Copycat, but the fun comes from watching Helen and M.J. piece together the clues to determine the killer’s pattern (the reveal is particularly clever).
Of course, Copycat is not a perfect film. Despite the aforementioned twists and turns, the overall narrative arc is pretty predictable (Helen must eventually face her agoraphobia head-on) and the twist in the final scene, while creepy, isn’t wholly necessary (and is a tease for a sequel that never came to fruition).
That being said, Copycat is still one of the more underrated thrillers of the 90s that should find its way back into popular culture. It did moderately well at the box office, making $32 million on a $20 million budget, so clearly some people have seen it. Give it a re-watch (or watch it for the first time) this week to celebrate its 20th anniversary!
Steven Spielberg has always been conversant in the cinematic language of the horror genre, despite relatively few credits in the genre. His contributions as a writer and producer on things like Poltergeist are legendary, and films like Duel and Jaws certainly wield the horror genre in remarkable, often chilling ways. He may not be a horror filmmaker, but he knows when he needs to scare us, and he has the tools to make that happen.
I didn’t go into Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s alien epic, expecting outright horror, and indeed the film leans much more into thrilling than frightening. This is not a horror film, but for a few minutes in the middle, much to my surprise, it became one.
Spielberg has filmed more than his fair share of scary scenes over the years, but with Disclosure Day, he directed a new contender for the scariest scene of his entire career.
SPOILERS AHEAD for Disclosure Day!
Josh O’Connor in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
Among the various alien secrets laced throughout Disclosure Day are a trio of palm-sized rods, the color of pencil graphite. These rods, originating from another planet, can be used for a number of things, but for the purposes of this scene, the most important is “diving,” gripping the rod in one bare hand and using its power to “dive” into the mind of another person.
The person holding the rod in this scene is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), head of shadowy cybersecurity firm Wordex, who is hellbent on keeping human knowledge of extraterrestrials secret from the general public. Scanlon’s trying to find whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who’s got all of those alien secrets tucked in a backpack while he’s on the run, and while Daniel’s more experienced mind is protected from diving, his girlfriend Jane’s (Eve Hewson) is not. So, monitored by medical personnel at Wordex headquarters (diving is dangerous), Scanlon pushes his way into Jane’s mind to find the location of Daniel’s safe house.
A telepathic invasion is scary enough on its own, but Spielberg doesn’t stop there. When Scanlon dives into Eve’s mind, he appears to her to be sitting across the kitchen table, like he’s in the room. Her bright blue eyes turn Scanlon’s dark brown, and she loses much of her control over her own body, not to mention her mind. Moments before, Daniel finally shared with her the secrets in his backpack, so Jane is shocked, conflicted, deeply vulnerable when Scanlon slips inside her head. This is not just telepathy. This is possession.
Spielberg underscores this not just through the visual language of the scene, as Jane breaks out in a sweat and struggles to sit upright as Scanlon invades her mind, but through Jane’s background. As she revealed to Daniel earlier in the film, Jane is a former novitiate nun who left her convent when she began to question her calling. She still believes firmly in God and, more importantly, believes that perhaps proof of alien life should be kept secret from the public because, in her eyes, it would upset the entire balance of faith in the world. God is a defining factor for humankind, Jane argues, and showing humanity proof of creatures from the stars would undercut that in dangerous ways.
This context, combined with the crucifix necklace Jane’s holding in her hand at the time of the dive, makes this scene the closest thing Spielberg will ever shoot to something out of The Exorcist. It’s not just a battle of wills, but a battle of faith. As an amoral technocrat worms his way into her memories, her beliefs, her faith, Jane turns the crucifix into a weapon, squeezing it until her hand bleeds when she discovers that a pain response can momentarily push Scanlon out of her head.
Of course, when you put a crucifix and a bloody hand together, it conjures images of stigmata. Screenwriter David Koepp pushes the allusion further by having Scanlon quote Christ on the cross to Jane by way of convincing her that she must be the one to stop Daniel by any means necessary.
It’s easy to see why this is scary, right?
On a very basic level, you have a powerful, wealthy man subduing and assaulting an innocent young woman, which is frightening enough. Then, the layers of the scene kick in. Scanlon doesn’t just assault Jane, but possesses her, seizes her memories, her knowledge, and finally her own free will, all while Jane literally clings to her faith in an effort to fight back. Disclosure Day is, among other things, a story about who has a right to the truth, and Scanlon believes that he should be the arbiter of that truth. Not just the truth as he sees it, but the truth as Jane sees it as well. If they don’t see eye to eye, he’ll make her.
But the possession, as it turns out, cuts both ways. Using the rod to dive is, for a normal human being, an intensely strenuous process. Scanlon admits that previous attempts almost killed him, and for some members of his time, so much as touching the rod results in a near-death experience. Even accessing an unprepared mind like Jane’s takes a lot of Scanlon, and when she kicks him out by squeezing the crucifix – again, so much meaning embedded in the details here – his team holds him back and tries to offer medical intervention. But Scanlon persists, pushing them away, and keeps diving back in.
This means that Jane can’t escape him because he just won’t stop pushing back through her defenses, but it also means that each time Scanlon enters her mind, and thus the safe house, he looks more monstrous. By the end, through a combination of lighting and makeup, Firth barely looks human, conjuring up images of the possessed Father Karras at the end of The Exorcist.
Colin Firth (center, standing) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
On a pure, visceral craft level, all of this is quite frightening, but the real trick to making this scene into Spielberg’s most terrifying lies in the more existential horror surrounding all of this. Disclosure Day is a film about the battle for the truth over extraterrestrials, but it’s also about a fight against an impossibly powerful surveillance state, the devaluing of human and alien lives in favor of some nebulous collection of assets, and the value of the individual in a world that increasingly lumps people into demographic boxes and writes them off.
In this scene, the surveillance state becomes supernatural, a human life is worth less than a piece of information, and an extragovernmental technocrat would rather sacrifice his own humanity than see reason. In 2026, few things could be more terrifying than that. Spielberg knows this and wields it mightily, proving once again that, while he’s not a strictly horror filmmaker, he can direct horror with the best of them.
Disclosure Day is in theaters now.
Eve Hewson (second from left) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
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