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| Borges. |
The great Argentine man of letters Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) had a few treasured images that he returned to over and over again throughout his body of work: knives, tigers, labyrinths. Also mirrors, which is interesting, because they scared the shit out of him (it would be sort of like Graham Greene populating his works with birds; Greene was terrified of birds). For Borges, the mirror�s horror consisted of its tendency to replicate images ad infinitum. If you place two mirrors in front of each other, they theoretically reflect each other�s images into infinity. Infinity is a horrifying prospect, an abomination of space and time (and Borges wrote a famous essay called, �A New Refutation of Time,� from which Digable Planets got the title for their album, Reachin� (A New Refutation of Time and Space). It should also be noted that Borges wrote an essay called, �On the Duration of Hell.� Borges�s courage in confronting these terrifying concepts is impressive to me. It would be like me writing an essay called, �Spiders, Lots and Lots of Spiders.�) The mirror is also one of the most consistently used devices in horror movies. It usually goes something like this: a person goes up to one of those combined mirror/medicine cabinets (and I�ve never lived in a place that had a medicine cabinet; for the longest time I thought they just existed in movies, but I�ve used friends� bathrooms, and some of them have medicine cabinets), I say, they go up to a medicine cabinet, they open it, fish around in it for a bit, and then close it, and suddenly there�s some scary shit right behind them reflected in the mirror that wasn�t there before. Now, the old ghost-in-the-medicine-cabinet-mirror gag is hardly original, but I understand why filmmakers keep doing it; it is the ultimate jump scare; I am never not scared when I see this in movies, even though I�ve seen it done to death.
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| White: Melody of the Curse. |
Now, in the 2011 Korean film White: The Melody of the Curse (released in the U.S. as just White), writer-directors Kim Gok and Kim Sun up the ante; it�s not just medicine cabinets; the film is positively swarming with mirrors (like spiders! a swarm of fucking spiders!), featured most prominently in the dance the studio where the film�s doomed girl-pop quartet (or �showcase,� as the Koreans seem to call them) do their rehearsing. Imagine the horror of ten mirrors reflecting an Asian horror ghost! (NB, the typical Asian ghost has bleached-white skin and black hair, but the ghost in this movie has bleached-white skin and whitehair; variations like this, minor though they may seem, are rare in Asian horror; kudos to the two Kims). White is probably the best mirror-centric horror movie I�ve ever seen; certainly it relies upon the horrifying potential of mirrors to an extent unprecedented in my movie viewing experience. And hopefully someday the time will come when we can make a mirror-horror movie along Borgesian lines, where the implication of infinity will be enough to fill us with unspeakable dread.
