High school is fucking awful. You’re surrounded by hormonal teenagers, desperately trying to fit in while navigating a social hierarchy that makes the class system look like a fucking egalitarian utopia. Wear the wrong clothes, listen to the wrong music, or have the audacity to exist without the approval of whichever popular arsehole happens to be running the place, and you’re liable to spend the next five years being treated like a social leper.
I mean, that’s how it appears in American films, anyway. I’m from the UK, so I went to secondary school, which certainly had its problems, but it was less about cliques and popularity contests and more Hobbesian in a “nasty, brutish, and short” kind of way. My main concern was navigating the strange paradox whereby I couldn’t get girls to look at my knob, whilst simultaneously fending off boys who seemed to have an almost pathological obsession with looking at my knob. Which is why I assume I was perpetually pantsed in PE.
But, it’s little wonder horror films have spent decades turning teenage misery into supernatural revenge fantasies. Carrie gave us telekinetic prom-night carnage, The Craft made witchcraft the ultimate answer to teenage insecurity, and Mean Girls demonstrated that sometimes the most terrifying monsters are the ones wearing designer skirts. And yes, Mean Girls absolutely is a horror film. Marina Rae Sargenti’s 1990 directorial debut, Mirror, Mirror, is essentially all three of those films smashed together, with a cursed antique mirror thrown in for good measure.
The film follows Megan Gordon (Rainbow Harvest), a socially awkward goth (is there any other kind?) who moves to a new town with her recently widowed mother, Susan (Karen Black). Things aren’t exactly off to a promising start. Megan struggles to fit in at her new school, where the popular girls are a collection of insufferable arseholes (again, is there any other kind?), and her relationship with her mother is already strained. To make matters worse, their new house comes with a massive antique mirror left behind by the previous owner, and if there’s one thing decades of horror cinema have taught us, it’s that second-hand furniture is rarely worth the fucking hassle.
The mirror has a rather unpleasant history. Decades earlier, a woman named Mary Weatherworth (Traci Lee Gold) sacrificed her sister Elizabeth (Michelle Gold) in front of it, apparently hoping to appease whatever demonic presence lurks on the other side. The house’s former owner has left behind journals detailing the incident, but Megan doesn’t initially know any of this. Instead, she begins experiencing strange occurrences, including a grotesque apparition of her dead father and the mirror inexplicably dripping blood. Meanwhile, the girls at school continue making her life miserable, particularly Charleen Kane (Charlie Spradling), who seems to have made bullying Megan her personal extracurricular activity.
What’s particularly odd is that the film occasionally seems to take the bullies’ side. Megan is certainly an outsider, but the way she’s presented sometimes gives the impression that the problem isn’t the people tormenting her, but the fact that she’s a bit of a fucking weirdo. The film wants us to sympathise with Megan, yet occasionally seems to suggest that if she’d just stopped being so strange, perhaps everyone would have left her alone. It’s a rather peculiar message for a film that’s supposedly about the cruelty of conformity.
Poor Megan, really. If only she’d waited a few years for social media to be invented and then she could sustain herself off the the adoration of weirdos who spend their days gooning over hot goths who’d never fuck them. She could have had countless likes on Instagram posing with a horror DVD whilst wearing a top several sizes too small for her, or sold her farts in jars on Only Fans, without needing to summon a demon through an antique mirror. Honestly, the girl was born about twenty years too early.
Before long, Megan discovers that the mirror can influence events around her. A nosebleed here, a sudden asthma attack there, and she’s soon realising that this isn’t merely an expensive bit of antique furniture with questionable interior-design credentials. She starts using its powers to get back at the people who torment her, even manipulating Charleen’s boyfriend Jeff (Tom Bresnahan) into becoming interested in her instead. Unfortunately, the mirror has its own agenda, and when Jeff rejects Megan’s advances, the supernatural force behind it takes matters into its own hands. People start dying in increasingly unpleasant ways, and Megan finds herself caught between enjoying her newfound power and realising that she’s losing control of it.
What I like about Mirror, Mirror is that it understands the appeal of a revenge fantasy. There’s something satisfying about watching a bullied outsider finally get one over on the people who’ve made her life miserable, particularly when those people are the sort of smug, self-absorbed teenage pricks who deserve a bloody nose at the very least. Megan’s transformation from isolated goth to someone capable of fighting back gives the film a familiar Carrie-style trajectory, although the mirror adds an extra layer of supernatural nastiness.
As I mentioned earlier, I think we’re supposed to sympathise less with Megan than we are with someone like Carrie. The famous school-prom massacre in Carrie is basically the psychic-girl equivalent to bullied kid turning up to school one day with an AR-15 and 200 rounds of ammo. Whereas Megan feels more like a slasher villain, clearly reveling in what she is doing and becoming more and more cruel. Yes, it’s debatable how much of what transpires is Megan’s doing or the mirror’s. But still, as the film progresses, Megan’s one bad joke away from being Freddy fucking Kruger.
Rainbow Harvest is pretty good as Megan, too. With her heavy black eye makeup, dark clothes and rather distinctive hairstyle, she looks like someone who’s wandered out of a goth club and accidentally enrolled in an American high school. There’s an obvious comparison to Winona Ryder in Beetlejuice, but Harvest gives Megan enough of her own personality to make the character work. She’s awkward and vulnerable without being entirely passive, and there’s a noticeable shift in her behaviour as she becomes more comfortable wielding the mirror’s power. You can understand why she’d be tempted to keep using it, even when things start getting out of hand. She didn’t do much after this (this was her second to last film), which is a real shame.
The supporting cast is another draw. Karen Black plays Susan as a woman struggling to rebuild her life after losing her husband, while also trying to maintain a relationship with a daughter who seems determined to shut her out. Their relationship gives the film a little more emotional grounding than you’d expect from a low-budget supernatural horror flick about an evil mirror. Yvonne De Carlo is also on hand as Emelin, an antiques dealer who knows more about the mirror’s history than she initially lets on. It’s always a pleasure to see familiar faces from older horror and cult cinema turning up in these sorts of films, even if they’re occasionally left looking as though they’ve wandered onto the set wondering where their agent went.
The kills are probably the film’s biggest selling point. We’re treated to bloody nosebleeds, a particularly nasty death involving a shower, a drowning/throat gouging, and various other incidents that make the mirror’s influence increasingly difficult to ignore. The effects aren’t always convincing, but there’s a pleasingly visceral quality to the gore, and the film occasionally gets surprisingly inventive with its imagery. One especially memorable sequence involves Susan suffering a horrific accident with the kitchen garbage disposal; seriously, why do you Yanks insist on having these fucking things?
Visually, the film has a decent amount going for it as well. The mirror itself is an effective centrepiece, and the cinematography makes good use of reflections, distorted perspectives and the contrast between Megan’s dark appearance and her relatively ordinary suburban surroundings. There’s a slightly dreamlike quality to some of the supernatural scenes, and the film does a good job of making the mirror feel like something that shouldn’t be there. It’s not particularly polished, but the combination of gothic imagery and early-’90s teen-horror sensibilities gives it a personality of its own.
Where things start to wobble is the final act. As the body count rises, the film becomes increasingly tangled in its own mythology, with the mirror’s powers and the history behind it becoming more important than the character drama that initially made the story interesting. Nikki Chandler (Kristin Dattilo), one of the few students who genuinely befriends Megan, starts investigating the mirror’s history and eventually realises just how dangerous it is. By this point, the film has accumulated enough demonic activity, witchcraft, possession and supernatural shenanigans to make you wonder whether the writers were working from a checklist of horror tropes.
The ending is particularly strange, and not entirely in a good way. As the mirror’s influence becomes impossible to escape, Megan makes a final sacrifice in an attempt to stop the killing, only for Nikki to find herself apparently trapped in a time loop that mirrors the original sacrifice decades earlier. It’s an interesting idea, and the final image of the demon appearing in the mirror is suitably creepy, but the resolution feels rushed and muddled compared with the more straightforward revenge story that came before it. It’s as though the film suddenly remembered it was supposed to be about a demonic entity rather than a bullied teenager and tried to cram an entirely different movie into its final few minutes.
Still, I had a good time with Mirror, Mirror. It isn’t particularly original, borrowing liberally from Carrie and other supernatural horror films, and its third act doesn’t quite deliver on the promise of its setup. But the cast is solid, the mirror provides a fun central gimmick, and the film has enough atmosphere and practical gore to keep things entertaining. There’s also something appealing about its focus on female relationships, from Megan’s strained bond with her mother to her complicated friendship with Nikki, and her increasingly hostile encounters with the other girls at school.
Overall, Mirror, Mirror is a decent little supernatural horror film with a strong early-’90s identity. It has goth teenagers, nasty bullies, a demonic mirror, and enough grisly deaths to make you think twice about checking your reflection after midnight. It’s a little rough around the edges, and its apparent suggestion that being a bit of an oddball somehow makes you fair game for public humiliation is bizarre, but sometimes that’s exactly what makes these old horror curiosities worth revisiting.
The film also spawned three sequels: Mirror, Mirror II: Raven Dance (1994), Mirror, Mirror III: The Voyeur (1995), and Mirror, Mirror IV: Reflection (2000). They’re largely unrelated stories connected by the evil mirror, because apparently this particular piece of haunted furniture had enough unfinished business to sustain a decade-long direct-to-video franchise. The second film is notable for featuring an early appearance by Mark Ruffalo, which is a fun bit of trivia to drop into conversation the next time you’re at a party. Which, if you’re reading these reviews, is probably never. I can’t speak for the quality of the entire series just yet, but given how delightfully daft the original gets, I’m rather tempted to see just how far down this particular rabbit hole goes.
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