The Eye
Released in 2002, “The eye” is a horror movie from Hong-Kong, then, in 2008, an American remake with Jessica Alba. Both movies contain way too many magical scenes to study all of them, so I will discuss three with you here.
(4min30s, English with optional English subtitles)
In the original and the remake, a blind violin player gets a cornea transplant. Consequently, actresses Angelica Lee and Jessica Alba get to act as a blind person, then as someone who sees the world around us for the first time.
If you’re interested in the theme of blindness, I mentioned it repeatedly in my videos about the 26 Zatoichi movies, the blind samurai.
In “The eye”, we discover that the grafted cornea belonged to a young woman accused of witchcraft, thus plaguing the hero with disturbing visions where the real world is overlapped with memories from the organ donor:
(Watch the video version to see the scene.)
Difficult to recreate this effect live without tons of money. However, I can see two ways to exploit the idea.
First, we could have an object that appears when we mention the past to which it belongs. The object from the past overlaps the real moment in the present.
Second, we could have an object that transforms depending on the world to which it belongs. For example, an American coin transforms into a foreign coin when we recall the trip we took overseas. Or a key that ages and gets damaged when we talk about another key, ancient or lost.
Later in both movies, our main character bumps into someone on the street, in a magical way:
(Watch the video version to see the scene.)
In my video about the South Korean horror movie “Yeogo Goedam 4: Voice”, I had already mentioned this idea : going through something or someone to show that this object or person has a ghost-like quality.
Finally, in the 2008 remake, a ghost leaves a quick but interesting trace:
(Watch the video version to see the scene.)
The ghost leaves a print of her hand in the sugar spilled on the table.
We all know spirit slate effects where a ghost writes a message. Instead of that, we could sprinkle a slate with chalk, salt or sugar. Later, we show that an imprint manifested itself on this surface.
Both movies are almost identical in their magical scenes. Ghosts appearing while the camera moves behind a character, photos and mirrors showing the face of the hero or the organ donor, a scene in an elevator where we witness both an appearance and a levitation, and so on, and so on.
You can explore these ideas for yourself by watching the original from Hong-Kong, or the American remake; for once, the remake is not that bad.
See you next week, for another video.
