Review of My Little Eye (2002) by Daniel P — 17 Apr 2009

A reality show as filtered through dial-up (pre-broadband) era Internet, My Little Eye takes the concept of the Big Brother TV program to its next "logical" step, with five contestants tasked with living in a house somewhere in remote North America for six months.

But just as they're verging on finishing their stay (and by doing so collecting a million dollars), strange things start happening. My Little Eye was one of the first horror films to explore the possibilities of playing around with 'reality television' (in this case, reality internet) before the sub-genre got over saturated with copycats like Halloween Resurrection.

Though played as being seen through the webcams fixed in strategic spots around the house and surrounding areas (and in weirder places like on video games controllers and fountain pens), director Marc Evans gets quite a lot of scares from a surreal sonic mix, which emphasises some sounds to be louder than reality (like the crow - a bad omen - getting stuck in the attic that reeks of piss), and ads reverbs, echoes and distortion.

Far from taking you out of the film, this is a trick that works surprisingly well, building tension and getting quite a fair few of well earned scares in the first 35 minutes, until the enigmatic Travis (a small part played to great effect by Bradley Cooper) enters the house, causing curiosity, tension and doubt with the housemates.

The truth behind the webcast is easy to work out but nonetheless quite shocking, and despite some technical illiteracies with computer technology (no worse than in episodes of X Files or CSI) the revelations continue to thrill and horrify as gradually the housemates appear to meet sticky ends.

This is an underrated horror film, one of the best of the early 'noughties', with a gut-wrenching and powerful ending. It should also earn a place in film history by having one of the first truly 'interactive' DVDs, which included multiple viewing angles for the entire film using a webcast-esque portal, allowing the viewer to become even more of a voyeur.