“In the eye abides the heart,” composer Stephen Foster wrote long ago and movies are especially good at illustrating this home truth.  Michael Powell’s once-shocking and still powerful PEEPING TOM (1960) used cinema as a metaphor for the schism between art and real life.  The serial killer protagonist (not a spoiler, for those who haven’t yet seen it) uses his camera viewfinder as his window on the world… it helps him cope, it helps him detatch and it helps him kill.  Hailed now as a classic of psychological horror, this daring and unblinking film did real damage to Powell’s then-sterling reputation as the maker of such British classics as “I KNOW WHERE I’M GOING” (1945), BLACK NARCISSUS (1947) and THE RED SHOES (1948).  Clearly, audiences and critics on Powell’s patch didn’t like what they were seeing.

The ultimate head trip movie had a lot to do with eyes.  Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968)  was meant to be about our ultimate discovery of self, about our origins as a species and about where we were pointed in the twilight years of the 20th Century.  While the science fiction classic is literally lightyears beyond the seedy studio soundstages and glum bedsits of PEEPING TOM, it is just as concerned with gazing, with looking, with wonder, awe, desire, judgment and gnawing fear.  From the cold, all-seeing red ”eye” of HAL 5000, the super-computer villain who becomes both man’s mega-logical apotheosis, the apex of his learning, his technical prowess and his mastery over nature – as well as his custodian, guardian angel and executioner – to the unbelieving eyes of astronauts Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood as they confront their destiny, their destruction and the limitations of the human soul, 2001was yet another chilling existential inward glance that many filmgoers, who thought they’d maybe be seeing FLASH GORDON, were reluctant to meet eye to eye. 

A belated return to the director’s chair for Roger Corman after nearly 20 years devoted to producing, FRANKENSTEIN UNBOUND (1990) was a sprawling, ambitious amagalm of Gothic horror tropes and science fiction flourishes.  In a way, the twinned character arcs of Dr. Frankenstein (played here by Raul Julia) and his ”monster” (Nick Brimble) are similar to those of astronaut Dave Bowman and HAL 5000 in 2001.  Both stories reveal much about man’s perception of himself and his desire (aparently eternal) to duplicate himself, to improve upon nature (“… or God, if you prefer your Bible stories.”) and the horror he experiences when his creation – ugly, primitive, dangerous – proves to be more intelligent, more feeling and more elemental than he. The conclusion of this tale (based on the novel of the same name by Brian Aldiss) is no less apocalyptic than that of Kubrick’s cinema milestone, albeit less of a head-scratcher than a jaw-dropper, with man and monster pitched into a nuclear winter of the not-too-distant future, the latter of which surviving corporeal destruction to become eternal, God-like and, you guessed it, truly unbound.  

 Thepopular series of fright films, composed of both Japanese and American entries and spawned by Takashi Shimizu’s 2000 direct-to-video horror flick JU-ON (and including the Sam Raimi-produced GRUDGE 2, a promotional one sheet for which appears to the left) simmer with raging human emotions that, once banked and sublimated by proper civilized behavior, have erupted in horrible, unthinkable violence and a legacy of doom for anyone who wanders into the frame.  The wide eye pictured here belongs to Toshio, a 6-year-old child slain by his father in the white heat of jealousy over his wife’s (perceived) affection for another man.  His life taken in the act of witnessing his father killing his mother, the boy becomes a whey-faced harbinger of death, a textbook haint, a bringer of a curse that knows no satiety and a constant reminder that everything we do (these films seem to remind us), no matter how private, is seen, captured, burned into the retina of our collective consciousness.  Toshio is fearful – you don’t want to eyeball him – and yet also sad, tragic, pathetic.  Toshio is the heart and soul of JU-ON and THE GRUDGE and its sequels. 

The recent Spanish horror movie [REC] (2007) employs a dark-adapted (and, it should be noted, bloody) eye in some of its poster art.  Although the gnarly flick, co-directed by Jaume Balaguero and Paco Plaza, didn’t really work for me in the long run I appreciate the spareness and unity of its vision.  It’s an inspired riff on THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT (1999), or CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST (1980) if you prefer, using a reality TV show’s video camera as its only POV during a routine fire department rescue that goes horribly awry in a shadowy Barcelona apartment building. When the power goes out, the camera’s night vision feature becomes our only window on what the hell is going on and that limited viewpoint is truly unnerving.  In the end, we are left with the reality that the cold eye of technology, the symbol of our narcisism, testament to our own self-possession, will still be auto focusing after we are long gone.  The oozing orb depicted in this poster reminds me of both THE CRAWLING EYE critter and good old Hal 5000 from 2001, although I’d guess the resemblance is purely coincidental.  But then, that’s the thing about eyes, I guess… they all tend to look pretty much alike, even if no two of them see the same thing.