Behind You

Behind You has elements of The Exorcist, Child's Play, Signs, and even Beetlejuice, but it's also, to my knowledge, the first horror film in which an evil spirit is held off with peanut butter, and that, for better or worse, is something you don't see every day. Olivia (Addy Miller) and Claire (Elizabeth Birkner) are two young sisters whose mother has just died in an unspecified accident, and whose father apparently went out to buy the proverbial pack of smokes and never came back. Consequently the two girls are sent to live with their strange Aunt Beth (Jan Broberg), who may or may not have murdered her other sister (i.e., not the girls' mother) Angela in a prologue set 40 years in the past. Aunt Beth has several rules, the most important of which is not to go down into the basement. This is of course counterproductive and an example of something we could call The Bluebeard Effect – when you warn someone that they can't enter a particular room, that's exactly the first thing they'll do. That's Aunt Beth's first mistake. The reason the basement is off-limits is because the house is inhabited by a demon that can be unleashed by repeating an incantation three times in front of a mirror (the spirit conveniently writes the kabalistic words on the dust covering the mirrors). Now, all the reflective surfaces in the house are stored in the basement, and I don't mean a compact either, but a multitude of huge mirrors. This is Aunt Beth's second and biggest mistake. What would you do if you were Aunt Beth; a) destroy all the mirrors in the house or b) store them conveniently in the same place? First, she knows the devil's m.o. better than anyone (“the first door is the mirror, the second door is the mind, the third door is the body”). And second, none of her arcane – and equally convenient – knowledge says she can't just take hammer to the mirrors, even at the risk of hundreds of years of bad luck. But then, if everything were so simple there would be no movie (we should be so lucky). In short, Behind You is neither very original nor very clever, and neither very good nor very bad, but at least it's short; 86 minutes of mediocrity just in case you have nothing better – or worse – to do.