Self-conscious evocations of Halloween, Carrie, The Amityville Horror, The Exorcist, and Jaws are never elaborated to the point of either plagiarism or parody. Hardly more than winks of an eye, they nonetheless do an even larger job of conjuring up the entire history and foremost conventions of horror films in the Seventies, and of tipping us off that writer-director Ulli Lommel is not quite serious about working in this genre. The amazing thing about this movie, given its self-consciousness and its unsteadiness of tone, is how effectively it grabs you by the hair and pulls you along once it has sprung its central idea: the ghost of a murder victim, trapped inside a mirror for twenty years, is set free when one of the accomplices in that murder breaks the mirror, and the ghost is thereby multiplied into an army of demons as numerous as the shattered pieces. This graphic dramatization of the old superstition about broken mirrors has more in common with folk tales and fairy tales than with contemporary horror trends, and suggests ancestral roots for Lommel that stretch far beyond his immediate mentor, R.W. Fassbinder, back to Hoffmann and the Brothers Grimm. With Suzanna Love, John Carradine. (1980) — Duncan Shepherd
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