LOS ANGELES (REUTERS) - A haunted mirror, a murderous father and two siblings seeking revenge form the plot for the new supernatural thriller Oculus, which blurs perceptions and reality with ghostly scares.
Oculus, out in the United States and Canada on Friday, follows a young woman, Kaylie, who reunites with her brother Tim after his release from an institution where he was held for a decade for killing their father, who had murdered their mother.
Kaylie is convinced that a large ornate mirror in their home caused the mental instability and subsequent demise of her parents, and is determined to clear her father's name of murder by proving the mirror is haunted by a manipulative entity.
"Kaylie is not running from the entity, she's running to it, and the worse it gets, the more happy and excited she gets because it's verifying everything that she believed, so it's just counteracting everything that we're used to," said British actress Karen Gillan, discussing her character.
The film flits between past and present, and what is real is constantly called into question as the two siblings try to right a heinous wrong. In one particularly unsettling scene, Kaylie bites into an apple, only to find it's a light bulb.
"To play with who's sane, who's insane, we start off thinking that Kaylie is completely together and then we gradually think that maybe she's totally unhinged," Gillan said.
"It's all about perception because that's what the mirror plays with," she added.
Oculus is the latest release from producer Jason Blum's Blumhouse Productions, the company behind the runaway success of Paranormal Activity, a film made for US$11,000 (S$13,727) that grossed US$193 million at the worldwide box office, spawning a franchise for Paramount Pictures, which distributed the films. Five Paranormal Activity films have grossed US$807 million globally.
The Paranormal franchise deals with a supernatural demonic entity that haunts the interconnected families featured in each film, and has set off a new wave of ghostly horror films.
Doctor Who to Nebula
"Horror movies have gotten much more supernatural-focused, and I think that's what the trend is at the moment, but I think at some point it'll swing back to more real, horrible events," Blum said.
Blum said the budget for Oculus, which will be distributed in the United States and Canada by Relativity Media, is on par with his other successful recent horror films Sinister, Insidious and The Purge, placing it between US$1.5 million and US$3 million.
Oculus is expected to take in US$13 million at US and Canadian theatres in its opening weekend, according to Boxoffice.com. Relativity paid US$2.5 million for domestic distribution rights.
Scotland native Gillan, 26, had her breakthrough role in 2010, playing Amy Pond on British time travel sci-fi television series Doctor Who, an experience that she called "my three years of drama school." Since then, she has been cast as the villain Nebula in the upcoming Marvel film Guardians Of The Galaxy, a role that she shaved her long red hair for.
"The female villain in the film, that is something I've never done before, it's brand-new territory, and I just thought I'm going to have some fun with this," the actress said.
In addition to shaving her head, Gillan trained for two months to get into the physical shape of Nebula, a sadistic assassin employed by super-villain Thanos. She said she is fascinated by human behavior and psychology.
"Finding the motivation for her to be the baddie is quite interesting. It's like being a lawyer, finding the redeeming features so that she's not just bad for the sake of being bad,"she said.
"And it's just fun to play the baddie," she added with a laugh.
