Can I confess something that may be surprising? I LOVE a good goth girl movie. I know, hard to believe right? Even more than that, I love a good bullied, shy girl, revenge movie, because, believe it or not, this darkly feminine beacon of rubbish opinions with a three-month script for Ativan and a penchant for making small children cry, was once a shy and arty loner. Crazy, N’est-ce pas?

The late eighties and early nineties gave rise to the popularity of the goth girl with films like BEETLEJUICE (1988), THE CRAFT (1996), THE ADDAMS FAMILY (1991), ELVIRA: MISTRESS OF THE DARK (1988), NIGHT OF THE DEMONS (1988), and a little-known horror gem called MIRROR MIRROR (1990). Gone were the tan, mammary-inflated, bleach-blonde 80’s slasher babes, and in their wake, came the darkly captivating ladies of goth who were out to show the world you don’t cross a girl with a snatched cat eye and a Hot Topic wardrobe.

PLOT:

Shy teenager Megan (Rainbow Harvest) moves to a new town with her widowed mother (Karen Black) and quickly becomes the most unpopular girl in high school. But when she starts to communicate with a mysterious mirror, her tormentors begin to meet with a horrifying series of 'accidents'. Is the mirror a reflection of Megan's own inner demons... or has she unwittingly opened the doorway of the damned?

KILLS:

Out of the gate, we have our first kill in the opening scene of the film, where, in 1950’s Iowa, a girl named Mary Weatherford murders her sister Elizabeth in her bedroom in front of a large, ornate mirror that Mary mysteriously puts a black cloth over. We then cut to a few decades later, and we meet high schooler Megan (Rainbow Harvest) and her recently widowed mother Susan (Karen Black) move into the infamous Weatherford house to start a new life. Of course, Megan gets the death room with that big ugly mirror and decides to keep it, even when the realtor tells her it's supposed to have been taken out of the house. Megan is immediately laughed at and bullied at her new high school, sticking out like a dark shadow among the poofy, White-Rain hairsprayed girls with their oversized pastel Benetton sweaters. She does, however, meet a popular girl named Nikki (Kristin Dattilo), who comes to her aid, and provides a genuine arm of friendship for the shy girl.

The seemingly innocuous mirror quickly becomes anything but. Susan’s dog (which she got only two weeks ago and has a penchant for peeing on the furniture) mysteriously dies, and Megan herself is visited in the night by the gruesome form of her dead father. Once Megan realizes the power the mirror contains and that she can harness it, she starts on a campaign of revenge on her classmates not seen since 1976’s CARRIE. She gives her snarky teacher Mr. Anderson (a great Stephen Tobolowsky cameo), a horrific asthma attack in class, and kills a girl bully in a bathroom with mirror shards that come out of nowhere. Megan uses the mirror to manipulate Jeff, the boyfriend of her main nemesis, into developing a crush on her and gets him into her bedroom. When he puts the brakes on their makeout sesh, Megan proceeds to have the mirror murder him, demonic hands protruding from the vessel and slashing him to death.

Megan quickly learns - as in most demonic witchcraft movies - that she is not truly in control of the demonic force that is helping her cut down her bullies, and pretty soon, the mirror sets its sights on Megan’s mom, Susan, whose hand gets absolutely destroyed in a garbage disposal and bleeds to death.

VISUALS/SFX:

Director Marina Sargenti and Cinematographer Robert Brinkmann make solid use of exaggerated low angles and blue filters, that give a kind of cool, but also cartoonishly menacing style that felt at times, quite giallo in its execution. The scene where Megan finally realizes the mirror’s power and she starts licking the blood dripping down it as she makes out with her own image is so goddamn fierce, it looks like a cutting room scene of a Depeche Mode video.

In perhaps one of the best scenes of the film, Megan’s main bully Charleen (Charlie Spaulding) is showering alone in the enormous girls locker room after getting into a fight with Megan in the pool during their swim class. I should say that though this scene features a good deal of nudity, it is not at all male gaze-y, and in fact, only heightens the vulnerability of the character in the situation as steam pipes start bursting all around her, scalding her very naked flesh. The horrific scene is intercut with the image of the girls from her class still in their swim class, all in identical, simple, black swimsuits, their movements in the water feeling synchronized, like witches dancing around a fire. It’s just so visually fantastic.

I’d also be remiss in not mentioning Rainbow Harvest’s wardrobe in this film as it is a powerful visual element in and of itself. She looks like the illegitimate daughter of Siouxsie Sioux and Dramarama’s John Easdale, who conceived her while bone-zoning on a bed made out of Sisters of Mercy cd’s. In short, it’s FANTASTIC. Oversized black plastic earrings, huge spider web-like hats, leather jackets, gauzy onyx skirts, and smoky, exaggerated eye makeup for dayyyyysss. When we first see Megan in the film it is a visual punch to the face - you can’t help but look at her because she stands out so powerfully against her environment. Even before she changes her look up later on in the film to a more bared down, sleek and sexual goth look, Megan (or should I say, Rainbow) is impossible to tear your eyes away from.

PERFORMANCES:

With a cast and crew that was predominantly female (led by a female director and screenwriters), it's perhaps not a huge surprise that this demonic horror film is, at its heart, centered around women-focused friendship. Nikki and Megan, though on the surface, very different, form a lovely friendship, one that I saw my high school self in in its representation.

Kristin Dattilo is solid as Nikki and brings a warmth and likeability to her performance, but the film is all on the black, leather-clad shoulders of Lydia Deetz lookalike, Rainbow Harvest’s back, and she pulls it off wonderfully. She brings a vulnerability to Megan, but also a dangerous undercurrent to her personality that makes you uneasy at how far she is willing to take this newfound power. I often wonder what could have been with her film career as she was seen as a kind of Winona Ryder knock-off after this film, but I would have loved to have seen her continue with it (I should say however, that though she left acting in the early 90’s, she has several degrees and is doing well working in the private sector). The fabulous Karen Black makes the most of her supporting role as Megan’s hot mess of a mom, who smokes cigarettes, wears multiple wigs, and hooks up with the local pet funeral director just four months after her husband died. Though she seems strictly superficial, she does actually care about her daughter, which makes it even more heartbreaking when she gets her arm chopped up in the garbage disposal.

OVERALL IMPRESSIONS:

MIRROR MIRROR often gets compared to the classic Brian dePalma revenge tale, CARRIE (1977), but though these are both about shy outcasts who take revenge on their tormentors, MIRROR MIRROR’s pathology feels decidedly more sinister. Carrie White was a girl who was born with special abilities that she didn’t understand, but there is something inherently sinister in a mirror that contains a demonic force. And isn’t a mirror the most innocuous vehicle for evil? We see ourselves in it, so how can it be bad if it's just a reflection of ourselves? But what if that reflection contains unchecked trauma and rage? Early on in the film, Megan’s teacher, Mr. Anderson approaches her in class and asks, “what’s your problem?” Megan quietly replies: “I don’t have a problem,” to which Mr. Anderson bluntly replies, “Sure you do. You just don’t have a solution.”

For Megan, her family trauma, her social isolation, her new unfamiliar environment are sources of pain, anger, and anxiety, and her solution is the mirror. It allows her to exert a power that she feels has been taken away from her, ultimately poisoning her mind. She’s become an Alice In Wonderland-like character, falling into the abyss of an evil that is absolutely terrifying once we finally see it emerge in the final reels of the film. MIRROR MIRROR is sadly an overlooked gem, a dark fairytale that beckons the most horrific parts of ourselves to look into its endless visage and make a wish.

THE GORY DETAILS:

Zelda Rubenstein was slated to star in the film, but dropped out for unspecified reasons.
The film was followed by three sequels, Mirror, Mirror II: Raven Dance (1994), Mirror, Mirror III: The Voyeur (1995), and Mirror, Mirror IV: Reflection (2000). The second film notably featured an early film appearance for Mark Ruffalo.

MY RATING: 7.5/10

WHERE TO WATCH:

Philo, Tubi, The Roku Channel, Crackle, PLEX, Amazon Prime, fuboTV, and YouTube.

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Nov 2, 2020

Dana Vargas