#02. My Little Eye (2002, Marc Evans)
By Eivind Langdal
6th Septemeber 2009

”Big Brother” meets the horror genre. You might not think it is the best pitch ever having been given to a studio executive, but that probably means you haven’t seen My Little Eye, which is not only a scary film, but a biting satire on the reality genre as well. I don’t know if that really is an accomplishment, as reality shows practically satirize themselves (unintentionally), but at least the movie tries something different. I think it deserves to be applauded for that. I think it also deserves to be applauded for a few other things as well. Let me dive a little deeper into those things in this review.

The set-up is simple (I’m hoping I won’t have to use that phrase too often in this feature): three guys and two guys have signed up to participate in an online reality series where they are to spend half a year in a remote cabin. If one of them leaves, none of them will get the prize of one million dollars (given individually, not collectively). It all seems so easy, and indeed, for the longest time, that’s what the characters think as well. The film starts with a montage showing the contestants’ auditions, moves on to them getting acquainted with the house, and then it jumps forward in time to a point where they only have a few weeks left before they are finished. Up ‘till this point, they’ve had it easy.

What I really like about My Little Eye is that its five actors are really good. Sure, they essentially play stock horror characters, but what they prove here is that previous horror characters may not necessarily have been stock if they had been played by better actors. The characters are: Emma, a quiet girl who harbors a secret about her past, Charlie, her promiscuous counter-part, Rex, a sarcastic computer geek who has more understanding of what he is a part of than the rest of the characters, Danny, who has a lot in common with Emma, and Matt, who is the essentially the group’s straight man.

We follow their quest for money through the use of hundreds of cameras that have been placed throughout the house. Sometimes we are shown split-screens so that we can see what is going on several places at once. At one point, we get an intimate reading of a letter because a camera has been put into one of the pens in the house. The cameras really add to the reality feel of the narrative. The grainy image recalls The Blair Witch Project, but My Little Eye doesn’t rip that film off. Instead, it builds on the things that made Blair Witch such a great film and takes them to the next level. In that film, the characters operated the cameras themselves. Here, they are trapped by them. There are so many cameras in the house that the characters can’t even sneak off and be for themselves. The only thing we don’t get to see is the viewer. Except, we do. We simply have to look at ourselves. Indeed, My Little Eye doesn’t just poke the finger at reality series, but also the viewers of such shows.

What I really like about My Little Eye is how naturally things start to go wrong in the story. At one point, Danny is given a letter that states that his grandfather is dead. The funeral is set on a date that precedes the one where they leave the house. The characters debate for a long time if Danny should leave, or if he should stay. Why stay, you say? Well, one of them (that would be Rex), figures it’s just a trick from the producers to liven up the tension. Is it? I won’t tell, but as it turns out, Rex is quite the wordsmith, and makes compelling arguments why they should stay. Obviously, the real reason Rex doesn’t want Danny to leave is because that means Rex loses his prize. He even says that.

For the longest time, My Little Eye is happy to stay tense. But the characters are smart, and they skillfully start to suspect they may have gotten more than they bargained for when a backpacker stumbles upon their house and says he hasn’t heard of their show, despite him being a man who, as he puts it, lives on the internet. The contestants figure he has simply missed their site (after all, there are quite a lot of them on the internet), but we can tell by the look of their faces they know that this isn’t necessarily the chief reason why he hasn’t heard of it.

One of the more eternal debuts in horror is, what is scarier: the real or the unreal? On one side, reality trumps because if we are watching things that could have happened to us in real-life we are easier engaged. On the other side, the unreal trumps because if the sky’s the limit, there’s no shortage on what horrors might be conjured by the filmmakers. Personally, I am not sure which one I prefer. I guess they are both works for separate reasons. However, if you asked me which one I preferred right after seeing My Little Eye, I would definitely say the real is scarier. In fact, that was my exact thought after I saw the film. Here was a film where the characters were believable, where the atmosphere could make you believe this actually could happen and were the choices by the characters never strained the rules of logic.

Although the reality satire in My Little Eye doesn’t quite give the same bite it gave when it was released in 2002, the hyper real atmosphere given by the cheap cameras gives it a vibe that is timeless. This is, to put it in simple words, a film that is very scary. But it is also mischievously inventive, and instead of recycling tired and hackneyed horror conventions, it makes up its own. Don’t let its low-key status fool you: this is a high-class horror.