'Mirrors' director won't soften the gore of horror
When horror spoofs itself director Alexandre Aja gets mad.
"I think what will kill the genre again will be what killed the genre in the '90s, which was the Scream kind of movies," he says.
Aja is doing his best to see that it doesn't happen. He makes seriously gory stuff. This time, he has turned his gaze from the cannibal mutants of his 2006 hit The Hills Have Eyes to malevolent looking-glasses in Mirrors, opening Friday.
Kiefer Sutherland plays a department-store security guard whose reflection turns evil in a chain of events that Windex can't wipe away.
Aja says he found himself magnetized as a boy by movies such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween and The Shining.
Aja believes he is on the vanguard of protecting against the re-softening of horror. He used to lean more toward the supernatural, but his zest for its bloody manifestations grew. Mirrors allowed him to dole out copious servings of both the spiritual and the grotesque.
"We all have a relationship to mirrors," he says. "How many times a day is a human being going to look at himself into a reflection?"
While he says that new developments relieve his fears that the genre will reach the saturation point or be slashed again by goofiness, he doesn't plan on being all guts and gore forever.
"In any genre," he says, "I can find what interests me, and that is human beings facing some extreme situation."
