This is the fictional story of five strangers picked to live in a house and have their lives taped to find out what happens when people stop being polite and start getting murdered… My Little Eye. And if you haven’t seen this one, it’s the Best Horror Movie You Never Saw.
Reality shows are nearly unavoidable these days, but back in the ‘90s they were still rare. Aside from MTV’s The Real World and episodes of Cops, we hadn’t been exposed to much reality programming yet. And when word started leaking out about the development of shows like Big Brother and Survivor, they sounded odd. A little twisted, potentially dangerous. Big Brother was offering the chance to watch its contestants on 24/7 live streams. Survivor was taking its contestants out to isolated locations and leaving them to provide basic survival necessities for themselves. While the concept of Big Brother just seemed weird, the description of Survivor stirred up real concern that somebody could die on that show. We know now that everything has turned out fine. Survivor has aired for over forty seasons to date and Big Brother has proven to be so popular that more than sixty countries have put together their own version of the show, resulting in over five hundred seasons airing across the last few decades.
It was when we were hearing the first rumblings of Big Brother and Survivor that writer David Hilton realized these reality shows were presenting the perfect set-up for psychological thrills. And there were also web cam streams online to provide more inspiration. A treatment was written that made its way into the hands of director Marc Evans, who had gotten his start in TV before moving into features with the drama House of America and the crime thriller Resurrection Man. Neither of which had been successful. So when Evans started developing the My Little Eye script with Hilton, he saw this as a make or break project. His directing career depended on it. If this one failed, he might never direct another movie. James Watkins was brought in to work on the screenplay alongside Hilton. And once a couple drafts had been written, the project was pitched to Working Title, a British film studio that’s a subsidiary of Universal. By then, it was the summer of 2000. Big Brother and Survivor had both made it to American airwaves. And right around the time the first season of Big Brother aired its finale, Working Title gave My Little Eye the green light.
The screenplay crafted by Hilton and Watkins begins with an online ad. Five contestants are being sought for a reality webcast. If they spend six months living in an isolated house that’s full of cameras, they’ll win one million dollars. There won’t be any competitions or evictions. All they have to do is live in the house – a place so far out in the middle of nowhere that they’ll be taken there by helicopter. Occasionally, supplies like food, booze, and cigarettes will be delivered to their door. But they will also have to fend for themselves, setting snares for animals in the surrounding forest, hunting deer, stuff like that. And if anyone leaves during that six month period, everyone loses. No one will get a single dollar.
We’re shown clips from the audition tapes for the five characters we’ll be following through the film. Stephen O’Reilly, who works primarily as a composer these days, was cast as Danny, the sensitive guy who’s into woodworking and was raised by his grandfather. His main goal is to be able to take his grandpa on a nice vacation once he gets out of the house. Sean C. W. Johnson, who may be best known for his work in the Power Rangers franchise, was cast as Matt, the good-looking guy who says he’s there for the challenge. Jennifer Sky was cast as Charlie, who’s on a quest to become famous. Sky hasn’t done much acting in the last twenty years, but at the time she had a following from her roles on the TV shows Cleopatra 2525 and Xena: Warrior Princess. She’s also known for having a short-lived marriage to Alex Band, the lead singer in the rock group The Calling and the son of Full Moon founder Charles Band. For genre fans, Kris Lemche may be the most well-known cast member among the contestants. Around this time, he was also in Final Destination 3 and the Canadian werewolf classic Ginger Snaps… And if you want to spend a day just watching Lemche be awesome, Ginger Snaps, My Little Eye, and Final Destination 3 would make for a great triple feature.
The character of Emma is the obvious horror movie final girl. She auditions to be on this webcast because she thinks it will be a positive life experience, a way for her to learn about herself. How nice and wholesome. Of course she’s going to make it to the end. As he was putting the movie together, Marc Evans was drawing inspiration from John Carpenter. There are hints of The Thing in the film’s snowbound, isolated setting and the fact that the characters feel increasingly paranoid. But he has also cited the works of Roman Polanski as a source of inspiration, and part of the reason why he cast Laura Regan as Emma is the fact that she had a Mia Farrow vibe to her.
Evans told Jigsaw Lounge the Polanski influence can be found in “the atmosphere. Because a lot of his stuff relates to a house becoming a sort of malign presence. Repulsion, and Rosemary’s Baby as well.” He liked that Regan was reminiscent of Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby because “that character was in the same sort of position of not knowing what was happening to her.”
Regan has gone on to do more genre work, in the films They, Hollow Man 2, and Dead Silence, and a lot of television. O’Reilly, Johnson, Sky, Lemche, and Regan play the five contestants. But two other characters show up as the story goes on. Nick Mennell, who would later be killed by Michael Myers in Rob Zombie’s Halloween and Jason Voorhees in Platinum Dunes’ Friday the 13th, plays a cop. And Bradley Cooper, who has since been nominated for many Oscars, makes a brief appearance as Travis, a guy who says he got lost while skiing through the forest. But can he be trusted?
That’s the problem in this place, it’s never clear who you can trust. Knowing it wouldn’t be interesting to show the six months the characters spend in the house, Evans and the writers jump straight to the final week. That’s when everything starts to fall apart. The furnace breaks down. Food isn’t being delivered anymore. It seems like a stalker might be lurking at the edge of the forest. A message left on a frosty window and a bloody hammer on a pillow reference a traumatic incident from Emma’s past. Danny receives a devastating letter from home. The outsider Travis says he has never even heard of this webcast. A supply delivery contains nothing but a gun and some bullets. Is it taunting Rex about his father’s suicide? Is The Company trying to drive the contestants out of the house so they won’t have to pay them? Would The Company go so far as to kill them?
Filming on My Little Eye took place in Nova Scotia throughout the months of March and April in 2001, with sets being built inside an abandoned leisure center. To achieve the webcast look, the movie was shot on mini-DV camcorders. And since the house is meant to have cameras all over the place, much like the Big Brother house, there were around eight cameras covering each scene. So once Evans was in the editing room, any moment would have eight angles to choose from and he could pick which angles he thought a webcast viewer would click on.
As he put together the sound design, another filmmaker became a source of inspiration: David Lynch. Because, as Evans put it, Lynch “just knows to put you in this place that’s really strange that you’ve never been to before, with a masterful use of sound. He was a big influence.” The sound was recorded normally, then beat up in post-production to drop in aural disturbances, the constant sound of whirring cameras, and low industrial rumbles. Creating an atmosphere meant to get under the viewer’s skin.
The aim was to get the movie as close to a ninety minute running time as possible. Evans wanted it to be the cinematic equivalent of a thrash metal single. Short, effective, and nasty. But it proved to be very difficult to get the film down to ninety minutes. The first rough cut was four hours long. Evans started to lose confidence in the film as he went through the editing process, so Working Title suggested holding a test screening in Los Angeles. Unfortunately, that screening was held on September 11, 2001. And, understandably, the test results were terrible. Nothing was going to go over well with an audience on 9/11. For a while, the companies behind My Little Eye didn’t know what to do with it. It was so dark and unnerving. Was there any place for it in the post-9/11 market? It looked like it might go straight to video. Then they found distributor Momentum Pictures, which believed in the film and wanted to give it a theatrical release. And when a woman had a panic attack at a festival screening in Scotland, that just made it clear that Momentum had made a great decision when they acquired this movie.
Made on a budget of three million, My Little Eye earned nine million during its theatrical run. so it was a solid success. And when Universal brought it to DVD, they did some interesting things with it. An audio track called Conversations of the Company allowed viewers to eavesdrop on what members of The Company are saying to each other throughout the film. In a UK release, viewers could choose to watch a version of the film that was presented as if it was being viewed on the Company-run website. The interactive mode even lets you see certain scenes from multiple different angles. This includes the Travis and Charlie sex scene, so it proved to be a popular option for some viewers.
It’s cool that there’s a Company audio track and an interactive website version of the movie. But My Little Eye didn’t need those enhancements to be entertaining and intriguing. Evans put a lot of effort into creating a dark, unsettling atmosphere for his movie – and it paid off. When you’re watching My Little Eye, the imagery and sound really make you feel like you’re in the house with the contestants. Stuck in the middle of nowhere with something dangerous lurking outside. Evans and the writers did an excellent job building up the paranoia, and the cast did great work bringing their characters to life. That’s not to say all of the characters themselves are great. Some of them definitely could have been given more depth and made more interesting. But we still get drawn into the situation and want to see them come out of it okay. And if they don’t all come out of it okay, there are some expendable ones we wouldn’t mind seeing removed from the story.
As mentioned, Kris Lemche is awesome in this movie, making Rex the most fun character of the bunch to watch. While Emma worries about her past, Danny and Matt hang around being bland, and Charlies does her “horny girl wants fame” thing, Rex tries to keep things under control for as long as possible, in hopes of getting his money. And when things start getting too strange, it’s Rex who is able to start figuring out exactly what’s going on.
Rex is the MVP of the contestants, but the standout sequence of the film is the appearance by Bradley Cooper. Paranoia is already running high by the time his character Travis shows up at the door. Things have been getting increasingly uncomfortable in the house. Then this guy arrives, saying he got lost skiing. His GPS died and he’s not sure how to get back to his truck. Now it’s dark out and he needs shelter. So the contestants take him in – and he soon reveals that he has never heard of the webcast they’re supposedly on, even though he’s a programmer who says he lives on the internet when he’s not out skiing in the middle of nowhere. This gets the contestants more worried than they already were. Travis, on the other hand, seems surprisingly at ease. He quickly sets out to seduce Charlie, which is not a challenge. And not only do the cameras everywhere not bother him… he even gives them suspicious looks. When he speaks directly to one of the cameras the following the morning, it becomes very clear: there’s something bad going on here. Bradley Cooper is only in the movie for around nine minutes, but he makes an impact.
My Little Eye makes for an impactful viewing experience overall, even if you don’t remember the details of what happens in it beyond the fact that people get murdered. Somehow, by someone. The imagery and the atmosphere can stick with you for years. Marc Evans took the concept and made it into a very effective psychological thriller, and its success saved his directing career. He has continued working steadily ever since this movie was released in 2002, bouncing back and forth between feature films and episodes of TV shows. He has more projects lined up, making their way through pre-production. And it’s all because of My Little Eye.
A couple previous episodes of the Best Horror Movie You Never Saw series can be seen below. To see more, and to check out some of our other shows, head over to the JoBlo Horror Originals YouTube channel – and subscribe while you’re there!
