Oculus was a 2013 psychological horror film from Mike Flanagan (Doctor Sleep) that made audiences terrified of something as benign as a household mirror with its cursed Lasser Glass.
Flanagan, whose name is slowly becoming synonymous with the horror genre in general, released Oculus toward the beginning of his career. Oculus was originally intended to be a series of short films, but couldn’t get the funding to complete the series and focused his talents elsewhere. His first feature, Absentia, was funded through a successful Kickstarter campaign and ended up being released direct-to-video before being picked up by Netflix, which helped boost Flanagan right into funding for his next feature, which saw the director returning to his old idea and structuring it as a feature instead of short chapters. Oculus was Flanagan’s first theatrical release in 2014, but the film traveled through the festival circuit in 2013 before being distributed to a wider audience.
Starring Karen Gillan, Brenton Thwaites, Katee Sackhoff, and Rory Cochrane, Oculus is a paranormal time warp centered around two siblings who re-acquire a mirror that one believes is directly responsible for the untimely, violent deaths of their parents when they were children.
The Lasser Glass’ Origin Explained
Oculus explores the dark history surrounding the Lasser glass when Kaylie (Gillan) starts to go mad on a quest to prove the mirror’s supernatural influence. Her brother, Tim (Thwaites), is convinced that the mirror is merely what Kaylie has chosen to blame, as he’s been treated throughout the years by various psychologists who have all convinced him there was nothing supernatural involved.
In her research, Kaylie learned that events just like what she remembered date all the way back to 1754 and involved the mirror in a significant fashion. In 1754, the mirror belonged to Phillip and Virginia Lasser, who displayed the mirror prominently in their home. Phillip was found burnt to death at the base of their fireplace. Robert Clancy, who was a large man of around 300 pounds, obtained the mirror in 1864 and hung it in the ballroom of his Atlanta home. Soon after, he lost a dangerous amount of weight for an unknown reason and died. In 1904, Mary O’Connor from New England put the mirror in her personal bathroom and was found in her bathtub only two weeks later, dead from dehydration despite the bathtub being full of water. Alice Carden of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, hung the mirror in the children’s nursery in 1943. Carden ended up drowning both of her children, then smashed her own bones with a hammer inside the nursery. Her dogs also vanished from the home.
In 1955, Tobin Capp hung the bedroom in his mirror and was found starved to death in the same room with the mirror. His pet Dalmatian vanished and all his house plants were also dead. The mirror was hung in the lobby of Hill Trust Bank in San Diego, California in 1965. Maria Wicker, one of the bank’s tellers, locked her manager in the vault and chewed through a live power line. All the plants inside the bank died as well. In 1971, Oliver Jeffries, a New York City teacher, obtained the mirror and hung it in a central lecture hall. Like in other cases, his classroom plants all died, but he tried to destroy the mirror, then walked out of his classroom and into oncoming traffic. Marisol Chavez died from a hemorrhage related to a miscarriage and perished in the same room as the mirror in 1975. Chavez also pulled out her teeth with pliers and kept them in a plastic bag. In 2002, Alan and Marie Russell experienced the same dead plants and the disappearance of their family’s dog after Alan hung the mirror in his home office. Within two weeks, Marie suffered a nervous breakdown and ends up shot dead by her husband. Alan tried to kill his son, Tim, and daughter, Kaylie, but was shot dead by Tim in self-defense. The story of the Russell family is the central plot of the movie, Oculus.
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