Friday, August 15, 2008

Get Off My Intellectual Property!

I'm halfway interested in the new horror film Mirrors for a couple of reasons. The first is director Alexander Aja, who directed the stylish(but completely inconsistent and mindless) slasher chase film High Tension, and the remake of The Hills Have Eyes. I almost thoroughly enjoyed High Tension when I saw it in theatres, and felt that his Hills Have Eyes remake was technically superior to the original, but emotionally and viscerally not in the same league. The other reason is that the film's central idea is eerily similar to an idea I've been kicking around since high school.

As a teenager I had a dream where mirrors weren't just reflections, but windows to alternate universes that were almost perfectly identical to our own. They looked exactly alike, but I was convinced that people in that mirror world were living their own separate lives. I could only imagine what they were doing when I wasn't watching. In the dream it wasn't malevolent, but it's hard to deny the creepiness in that idea. So it's made it's way into several ghost stories I've tried to write, and I made it a concept in my long(and slowly) gestating haunted house script. It's not a close enough similarity to seem like more than a mild coincidence, and it certainly doesn't mean I need to change my story, but it is a bit irritating now that if I ever do make my movie, I'll have the inevitable comparison to contend with. Or maybe Mirrors will be forgotten by then. It seems likely.

Or, maybe the moral is that I need to get off my ass and do something.

Stay tuned...

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