![]() ![]() Of course, then Tom makes the mistake of going to a party that’s being given by his friend, Frank (Kevin Dunn). It’s not a glamorous life but at least it’s something with which Tom can be happy. So, he works hard and then he comes home and he has a beer and sometimes, he might go to a high school football game. But, now Tom’s reached his 40s, he’s got a wife named Maggie (Kathryn Erbe), a son named Jake (Zachary David Kope), and another child on the way. He wishes that his band could have taken off and he could have been a rock star. Tom wishes that he could have been something more than a phone lineman. Tom is a phone lineman who lives in Chicago. “Ghosts, they’re a real pain the ass sometimes, y’know what I’m saying?”įor instance, in Stir of Echoes, Kevin Bacon plays Tom Witzky. Sometimes, they haunt ordinary guys who live paycheck to paycheck and just want to be able to take some pride in having a home that’s free of secrets and evil spirits. ![]() Bonus points if you’re a marginal.As the 1999 film Stir of Echoes shows, ghost don’t only haunt the rich and famous. Stir of Echoes will still hit you where it hurts. A movie with such strong themes like this will always age rather gracefully and remain extremely watchable, though. They give it a campy charm, but don’t quite recapture the raw terror it caused when it originally came out. I’ve seen atrociously spooky shit since and it clearly belongs to another era with its rudimentary special effects. Is Stir of Echoes the killer punch it was in 1999? Maybe not. No wonder why Kevin Bacon kicks so much ass in it. It’s a movie where ordinary people are using their ordinariness to conceal their mediocrity and a weirdo comes in to save the day (so to speak). The kind of overbearing predictability that shelter people from their anxieties and end up swallowing their entire personalities. It’s a movie that antagonizes a certain form of normalcy. ![]() Now, Stir of Echoes is a solid supernatural thriller but it’s more than that. They leave Tom with the burden of awful visions and solving a murder he has jack shit to do with. Tom’s neighborhood was shaken by a drama he was previously unaware of and everyone seems more interested in lulling themselves back to normalcy than to confront the inherent horror of young Samantha ( Jennifer Morrison)’s disappearance. ![]() Turns out his neighbors have a good reason for surrendering their selves to the comfort of group activities. The one thing that makes Tom more interesting than his automaton neighbors is that he’s a musician and he somehow hasn’t completely given up on making it. He works, gets drunk with his neighbors on weekends, attends his local high school football team’s home game and quietly tries to raise his creepy son. He apologizes to his wife Maggie ( Kathryn Erbe) for being ordinary. Tom says it himself at the beginning of the movie. Weirdo, conformist normalcy of people who obviously (and literally) have skeletons in their closets. Stir of Echoes is a movie about normalcy. Tom quickly realizes that someone who’s been killed is trying to tell him something. His life become immediately less mundane because he starts having violent, disruptive visions. One night, Tom accepts being hypnotized by his sister-in-law ( Illeana Douglas) at a party. Twenty years after it was released, my hatred of uppity neighborhoods and people who are too much into their neighborhood is also why I still love Stir of Echoes today.īased on a Richard Matheson novel, Stir of Echoes tells the story of Tom Witzky (the immortal Kevin Bacon), a middle-aged phone lineman growing bitter with the mundane pressures of adulthood. You know how they say memorable art appeals to you for personal reasons? This is exactly why I loved David Koepp’s Stir of Echoes then. Nothing interesting ever happened and it could go on that way forever, they would’ve died happy knowing their existence had been fucking meaningless. The one thing I hated more than the place itself was how other people loved it. I was born in the middle of nowhere and lived the first half of my life over there. ![]()
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