Stir of Echoes (1999)

               This is another movie with some tenuous ties to a film I’ve already covered. In this case the movie is based on a novel by Richard Matheson, as was ‘The Legend of Hell House.’ This made me finally take a good look at his credits and apparently I’ve seen already a bunch of movies he’s been involved with one way or another, including ‘House of Usher,’ ‘Night of the Eagle,’ ‘What Dreams May Come,’ and, uh, ‘Jaws 3-D.’ He wrote a bunch of classic Twilight Zone episodes, as well 1971’s ‘Duel’ and ‘The Night Strangler,’ the sequel movie to ‘The Night Stalker.’ Considering how much of a seminal figure in mid-20^th century genre literature he is I’m starting to get a little embarrassed I wasn’t familiar with him before.

              This movie came about because director and writer David Koep was a fan of Matheson and wanted to do a horror movie. Koep had only recently made the turn to directing, having been a decently successful screenwriter since the late 80’s. He’d written or co-written movies such as ‘Death Becomes Her,’ ‘Jurassic Park,’ ‘Carito’s Way,’ and ‘Snake Eyes.’ His first full-length directorial effort was ‘The Trigger Effect’ in 1996, a thriller about chaos in southern California following a power outage. He still a very successful figure in Hollywood with something of a mixed record: on the one hand he wrote the screenplay for the first Sam Raimi ‘Spider-Man,’ on the other he directed the Johnny Depp vehicle ‘Mortdecai.’ In box office terms this movie made back roughly double its production budget of $12 million, which by Hollywood accounting practice means it just about broke even.

              I’m happy to say the cast in the movie is great across the board. The lead is Tom Witzky as played by Kevin Bacon, at the time unaware that in a scant fourteen years he’d be forced to appear in a whole 45 episodes of “The Following.” His wife Maggie is played by Kathryn Erbe, two years away from starting her run of 144 episodes of “Law & Order: Criminal Intent,” so if nothing else she’s set for life now. Their son Jake is played by Zachary David Cope, who pulls off a pretty solid performance for a five-year-old. This was his last credited performance, so hopefully he’s doing ok. Minor characters are played by some great character actors including Kevin Dunn as their neighbor Frank and Illeana Douglas as Maggie’s amateur hypnotist sister Lisa.

              Going from ‘The Haunting’ to this was like coming up for air. Despite having a budget fully 85% smaller this film has so much more life to it. Instead of a series of cavernous soundstages assembled into a single house through editing we have some brownstones in a middle-class neighborhood in Chicago. Instead of a bunch of strangers with sketched-in backstories we have two specifically drawn main characters and the people that surround them. Instead of CGI goop dripping everywhere we have classic in-camera effects along with some simple compositing. The plot is always heading somewhere and every payoff was carefully planted before. It’s a very grounded story about characters we care about.

              It also has a spooky kid that’s not the entire focus of the movie, which might be a first. As the movie opens it seems like it’s going to be about Jake as it’s established pretty quickly that he’s been talking to ghosts. The movie does something that’s equal parts clever and discomforting as the kid directly addresses the camera during the opening credits, both asking questions and responding to answers while looking straight down the lens. All of the imagery puts us on edge: he’s taking a bath, his dad’s in the next room plinking on his guitar and not paying enough attention, you’re braced for a zombie hand to come out of the tub and pull him under, but instead he just weirds out his parents as they put him to bed.

              The next couple of scenes do a great job nutshelling their domestic situation. Maggie’s friend Lisa is visiting and lets slip to Tom that his wife is pregnant. This is news to him and he’s very conflicted about it. He tells his wife that he’s happy about it, but then admits that he’s a little ashamed of his current job as a telephone lineman, that he wasn’t lying early in their relationship when he said he’d amount to more in life. This is a slender thread that winds through the movie and has a slight payoff. Maggie stresses to him that she’s fine with who he is and it’s made clear that their relationship is pretty solid but under some stress.

              Soon they leave Jake upstairs with a baby monitor and head over to the house across the street to attend a neighborhood party. This puts the audience on edge as both the characters and the camera are always glancing at the baby monitor and across the street to make sure the kid’s still all right. At the party we meet some minor characters who get involved in the plot later and the film also establishes that Lisa fancies herself a hypnotist. A drunk and edgy Tom insists she try it out on him and, as they say, he gets more than he bargained for. During the hypnosis scenes the movie uses a neat device where we see the visualizations suggested to him by Lisa. He’s in a theater, reads the word ‘sleep’ up on the screen, and gets some visual flashes of his house and some implied violence and then he starts awake. He has tears on his face and everyone around hm is laughing and having a good time. The party gets deeply uncomfortable when everyone realizes just how deeply he was hypnotized and that he doesn’t remember anything. He apparently talked about a guy who used to beat him up in high school and even stuck a safety pin through the skin between his thumb and forefinger. He demands they go home, clearly shaken.

Sure, I'd be worried too.

              Over the next few days he starts to see and hear things, which is where our ghost story comes in. Even when he’s having sex with Maggie he keeps getting flashes of plastic wrapping and a house under renovation and it’s starting to freak him out. He’s also always thirsty and over the course of the movie just keeps constantly necking water and orange juice. This is never really explained, by the way, but in a way that seems deliberate. I guess I just accept ambiguity more when the script is obviously well-written and thought out, I can accept no explanation if its clear that the characters never get one either. He wanders downstairs to calm himself down and while he’s sitting on the couch suddenly there’s a teenage ghost girl sitting next to him. She vanishes and after he looks around, confused, Jake comes down to see how he is. The kid feels his temple and tells him not to be afraid, he’s awake now. The next day he angrily calls Lisa to ask what else she did to him, and she protests that all she did was tell him to be open to new experiences, to tear down any internal walls he’d been hiding behind.

              The rest of the movie turns into a decently put-together mystery as Tom tries to figure out what’s going on with him and what the scary ghost girl wants. The ghost is played by a very young Jennifer Morrison, by the way, still a good five years from her stint on “House.” I like the way the story keeps itself restricted to this one ghost. It doesn’t expand to some crazy conspiracy, it doesn’t rope in serial killers or historical atrocities, there happens to be a ghost in the house that Tom lives in and when she realizes that he can see her she starts haunting him. Her death ends up being just as small and mean as most actual murders and her desire for revenge isn’t painted as noble.

              One thing about the movie that I really enjoyed is that it’s as interested about how what’s going on supernaturally affects both Tom and Maggie and their marriage as it is the spooks themselves. It doesn’t really focus on Jake as he’s pretty static throughout the movie. He’s off to the side being vaguely creepy sometimes, but for the most part he’s just trying to be helpful. The movie is much more interested in how suddenly having vague psychic abilities upends Tom’s entire life and how Maggie reacts and tries to understand. It also has both of them aware that supernatural stuff is real relatively early, so we don’t have many scenes where he has to try to convince his wife that he’s not imagining this stuff. Instead she’s caught in this terrible middle place where she knows what’s going on is real but absolutely hates what it’s doing to her husband.

              Kevin Bacon got all of the actorly kudos at the time of release. Just about every review of this I’ve run across does two things: it bemoans how this movie got lost in the aftermath of the success of ‘The Sixth Sense’ and mentions that Bacon does some of the best work of his career. And he’s very good here, when we first meet Tom he’s this working-class guy with a solid job and a wife he loves but who is clearly yearning after some kind of higher artistic expression. That’s probably a good chunk of why Maggie fell for him, this little something extra that maybe the other guys in the neighborhood didn’t have. When he first starts having psychic flashes he’s angry and scared, initially ignoring them and when that doesn’t work demanding that Lisa make them stop.

              The movie turns a corner one night when they decide to use a new babysitter. At Jake’s suggestion they hire a girl named Debbie, who turns out to be the sister of the ghost girl. As they’re leaving Tom keeps getting these red filters overlaid on his vision every time he looks at her. All the way to the baseball game they’re attending he keeps seeing the color red and hearing a buzzing noise. While he starts to panic, back at the house Debbie overhears Jake talking to Samantha and demands to know where she is. Tom finally loses his nerve as they’re about to enter the stadium and starts running back to check on Jake just as Debbie bundles him out of the house. Tom and Maggie arrive home to discover their son is missing. Then Tom starts following the red lights. Maggie follows, desperately asking him what they’re doing, and they catch up to Debbie at a train station. Apparently her mom works there and she was bringing Jake to talk to her. She brandishes a picture of the missing Samantha at everyone and Tom recognizes the ghost he saw. He declines to press charges, surprising everyone, and they go home. From this point on Tom is semi-obsessed and then completely obsessed with discovering what happened to the missing girl. Maggie, meanwhile, is worried about what this is doing to her family while also being aware that what Tom is experiencing is important.

The man has had a day.

              I really want to commend the movie for not sidelining Kathryn Erbe and her character Maggie. In a lot of movies if the focus wasn’t on the son it’d be on his dad, and while Tom probably gets the most screen time Maggie has a lot to do as well. As the only one of the three without psychic powers she complains to Lisa that she feels excluded from whatever’s going on with Tom and Jake. Her constant worrying about her husband missing work and sleeping on the couch waiting for the ghost to come back could come across as nagging, but his actions are so clearly escalating and her reactions so grounded and reasonable that I was torn between supporting both of them the entire time.

              She also has an odd subplot where she takes Jake to the park where they come across a police funeral. One of the officers attending notices that Jake has the gift and that she doesn’t. He guesses that he got it from his father and offers Maggie a business card with an address for where a group of like-minded people are meeting. I expected this to take over the last half of the movie but it’s really just a digression. Maggie shows up at the meeting instead of Tom, much to the officer’s annoyance. He briefly explains to her how ghosts work, that they have something they want and once they latch on to someone they don’t go away until they get it. It’s useful to the audience and it gives Maggie some agency but I can’t help but think this entire subplot could have been cut with very little effort.

              I’m not going to spoil the ending entirely but I’m glad that it is, generally speaking, a happy one. The bad guys get theirs and the ghost leaves, satisfied. It reconfirms that Tom and Maggie still love each other and even has something of a question mark final sting with Jake. There was a mostly in-name-only sequel in 2007 where a recast Jake is a minor character, but considering it’s a Sci-Fi Channel original starring Rob Lowe I’m not in a hurry to check that one out. For a lot of these movies I can spiral off into tangents or dwell on parts of the script that don’t make sense, here I don’t have much to either complain about or dig into for my own amusement. Instead I had to give it a bunch of compliments, oh woe is me. While I’m certainly not arguing this is a perfect movie it’s one of the most solid and well-put-together films I’ve covered this month. Outside of October I don’t watch a whole lot of horror movies so if I wasn’t putting this list together there’s a good chance I never would have seen this, which would have been a real shame.