Two Evil Eyes

A new trailer has arrived for The Eye, an upcoming remake of the 2002 supernatural chiller (Gin Gwai) by Hong Kong twin directors Danny and Oxide Pang. The flick's about a concert violinist in her twenties, blind since childhood, who undergoes a corneal transplant and finds herself seeing some fairly creepy stuff after the bandages come off. The Eye made it to U.S. theaters in 2003 for a limited run and was spoken of relatively well, if not especially profitable. I was never precisely sure why folks liked it, but The Ring remake had hit American theaters in 2002, and there was a nascent interest in Asian-inspired horror among the mainstream - and mainstream The Eye is.

It's fair to look at and decently put together, but transparently unoriginal, 35% cribbed from The Sixth Sense, released only a few years earlier and certainly still within audience memory. The other 65%? Michael Apted's 1994 Blink, starring Madeleine Stowe and Aidan Quinn. Stowe plays a blind fiddler who undergoes a corneal transplant, long story short, creepy stuff. To be thorough, both Blink and The Eye also owe a clear debt to The Hands of Orlac, Mad Love, and a longstanding cinematic tradition of evil transplants, but The Eye marks its 1990s influences pretty clearly on its sleeve.

The Eye has already been remade - Indian filmgoers got to see Naina, Shripal Morakhia's take on the story. Though I haven't seen it, reports are that it's both somewhat shoddy and almost note-for-note copied from the original. Naina hit Bombay theaters on May 20th of 2005, the same day as a flick called Nazar, about a young lady who suffers visions and comes to realize she's borrowing the perceptual span of a killer - in short, an adaptation of The Eyes of Laura Mars (1978), a likely influence on much of this borrowed-sight oeuvre.

The new Eye has been in the works for a while, and Ringu director Hideo Nakata was given the job way back when Renée Zellweger was set to star. Zellweger and Nakata left with a production shakeup. Jessica Alba got the part, and Nakata was eventually replaced with David Moreau and Xavier Palud, who made Ils (Them) in 2006.

The talent behind the fine new wave of French horror is being swallowed up by Hollywood even more quickly than the Japanese horror directors were assimilated. Moreau and Palud, like Xavier Gens (imported to make Hitman after directing Frontière(s)), were brought Stateside after a single film. Alexandre Aja made it all the way to two features before he showed up on U.S. shores. Fabrice du Welz, after a single feature (Calvaire), has an upcoming English-language gig called Vinyan, starring Rufus Sewell and Emmanuelle Béart. Shhh, nobody tell producers he's Belgian.