In recent years, supernatural horror has become about gore and jump scares, these movies aren't scary anymore! Paranormal Activity, The Grudge, The Ring, are you kidding me?! Those movies were terrible! They don't make movies like Stir of Echoes anymore, this is a supernatural thriller, that was truly unsettling and creepy, the kind of film that defines what supernatural horror should be. Tom & Maggie are celebrating moving into a new house, and as the party is winding down, Maggie's sister claims to know something about the supernatural. Tom (Kevin Bacon) is a complete skeptic, so she offers to hypnotize him and see what happens. Reluctantly Tom agrees and after seeing some strange flashes, Tom wakes up unsettled but still a non-believer. Over the next few weeks, Tom continues to see strange images of a girl asking for his help and believes his sister in-law messed with his mind somehow. Once convinced that she had nothing to do with it, Tom decides to investigate and try to find out, who this girl is and why she's asking for help. This movie is truly scary because depending on what you believe in, this could be 100% real. Kevin Bacon is one of those actors who when he is in the right role is better than anyone, and this role is perfect for him. Bacon had me on the edge of my seat and it seemed as thou this movie just flew by. I wanted to know who this girl was and what happened to her just as much as he did. As for the paranormal stuff, it wasn't bloody, gory, and out of nowhere but it was just as creepy. This is the kind of film that left you jittery and uneasy for hours afterwards, the definitive horror movie. Bad reviews had me skeptical, but I am a skeptic no longer, Stir of Echoes will most definitely be included in my next Halloween movie marathon!

One of the more underrated psychological horror films from the 1990's is Stir of Echoes. David Koepp, who has proved to be a big time screenplay writer for major blockbusters before Stir of Echoes, such as Jurassic Park and Mission Impossible, did some great things with this movie he wrote and directed. First off, there is a certain gritty feel to a horror film setting that takes place in a big city such as Chicago. Second, is the acting and character attitude that fit so well for the time period, has really paid off down the road leaving a nostalgic feel and believability. The story-line is connected fairly well and there are some good scares to be found. Kevin Bacon also does a great job at balancing his character to a rational minded human to an obsessively strange being. The ending does have a great twist, a ghost story that reminds me a lot of The Sixth Sense, which came out in the same exact year. Stir of Echoes is a solid horror flick that still holds up today, definitely worthy enough to re-watch if it's been awhile and escaped your mind.

A STIR OF ECHOES happens to be one of the better Big Screen adaptations of a Richard Matheson story, though it's FAR from being all that it should've been- THAT we'll attribute to the inability of most modern-day filmmakers to tell a coherent tale without reliance on some sort of special effects (which just tend to get in the way, anyway). Bacon does a good job in the lead, though it would indeed have been interesting to see Matheson's tale told as originally written. The overall feel of STIR OF ECHOES is not unlike that of some of the really creepy Japanese chillers that were all the rage back in the day. (Matheson was always ahead of the curve, if you ask me: his short story FROM SHADOWED PLACES, for instance, published a decade before THE EXORCIST, told the terrifying tale of a young man possessed by an evil spirit in a New York apartment. His contortions are described exactly like those we see the girl manifest in THE EXORCIST. A juju woman is called in to combat the evil, though she nearly died fighting it a decade earlier in Africa. She allows the evil spirit to enter into HER body so she can destroy it. Sound familiar? William Peter Blatty once said that he'd intended to make the Karras character a black man- the juju woman in FROM SHADOWED PLACES is black- but he changed his mind because he "didn't want to write Sydney Poitier." Coincidence? No doubt...)

I voted a 4 for this film and the only reason it arrived there was the cast and the quality of their work. They were all marvelous with a low- quality and repulsive script. The scenarist decided that the middle class of Chicago are dumb and kept them that way for the entire film. The original story was more in the suburbs of the films of Stephen Spielberg mixed with "Desperate Housewives".Don't get me wrong; the casting was great and so were ALL of the actors' work, but the script was a perversion of the work of a great film, television, short story, and novel writer. (The author of the original book was, among other things, one of the major authors of many classic episodes of the original "Twilight Zone".)The story was ruined by that change, but all of the "grunts" (actors, crew, director of photography, etc.) did great work. ALL of these actors are worth watching in this film... even if the "powers that be" ruined what could have been a good, new variation on "6th Sense".I realize that the producers need to make money with this story. So, they lowered the class and the IQ's of all of the characters so that a "middle American" audience would "identify with it". That's a sad fact for the film industry (especially in our epoch), but it's common for at least 30 years. That's why comic books (the same story several times over!) and even boardgames and toys are being transformed into "blockbusters". Writers in Hollywood have had almost no original ideas in the last 30 years, but since producers have no idea what "writing" or "originality" are, they produce and make money with middle America with stories that are the lowest common denominators in the field. Welcome to the industry of "art".I have a large DVD collection (more than 500 titles), but this one won't be added. ... However, I will write to the actors' agents so that I can pass the message that they did great work, nevertheless. (I'm a voice actor and I know we as actors are not responsible for the scripts: we just need to keep working like any employee and do our best.)