7. Stir of Echoes (1999)
1999 was a year where horror broke through and regardless of the box office or quality, it seemed to be a year where suddenly it was a viable commodity with the likes of The Sixth Sense, Ravenous, House of Haunted Hill and The Blair Witch Project all coming out. Due to the success of The Sixth Sense, a smaller but similar and probably better film was ignored. That film was Stir of Echoes based on the Richard Matheson novel of the same name. Stir of Echoes has the familiarity of the best of Steven Spielberg’s work and is reminiscent of Close Encounters with Kevin Bacon playing the everyman, blue-collar worker whose life is suddenly thrust into obsession and danger challenging everything he knew except here a mountain in the desert is replaced by a Rolling Stone’s song. Bacon plays Tom Witzky who is hypnotised at a party by his sister-in-law in a visually inventive sequence and experiences terrifying hallucinations. When he comes out of the hypnotic state he finds something is trying to communicate with him through his son and starts to dig (literally) eventually uncovering a horrible secret within his close-knit community.
Director David Koepp does a great job with Stir of Echoes, the grounded nature of the location and community presented really lends the film an air of familiarity which puts it above other films. When the spookiness happens, it’s presented in a subtle manner and the strange choices they made in terms of how to portray spirits give it the edge over the loud likes of House on Haunted Hill. From a 12 million budget the film made 21 million so it was still a minor win but stayed in the top ten just three weeks and was forgotten about. In the UK the film managed just £818,213 arriving in limited release 8 months after its US debut. The film was well received critically but definitely never went mainstream despite having a direct to Sy Fy channel sequel which should tell you all you need to know. The truth is this kind of low-key spook story would have been more at home in the 80s where it would have found more success and sadly audiences at the time wanted twists and effects rather than old-fashioned. Hell of a final scene here as well.
