We admit we both resisted going to see this film. After deriving so much pleasure and revelation from Shyamalan’s Sixth Sense, we hardly thought there was a need for yet another paranormal horror mystery. Stir of Echoes, however, surprised us. In many ways, this film could be seen as additional commentary to our thoughts and discussions that began with Sixth Sense. We are taken deeper into the darkness, and the craziness, and the fear, and then, we are brought out again with a realization that what we normally fear because it is unexplainable and uncontrollable, we really have no reason to fear.

Like in Sixth Sense, the netherworld is explored by an adult man, Tom (Kevin Bacon), and a boy, in this case, his son Jake (Zachary David Cope). Unlike the Sixth Sense, the little boy has a firm grip on what he sees and experiences. We are never shown his perspective, we only hear about it. The camera doesn’t reveal his point of view in the way it reveals Tom’s point of view. The visual effects are used brilliantly as a tool of getting inside Tom's mind and making us live the scary visions and thoughts that plague him. The visions come unexpectedly, in startling, disturbing flashes. The effects are quick and highly suggestive and might unfortunately turn more sensitive people from seeing the film, but the story compensates for any discomfort because we are eventually given the light with which to understand, accept, and reconcile what we’ve seen.

Tom awakens to the visions through a hypnosis session. At a party, Jake’s sister-in-law boasts about the power of hypnosis. The drunken group she is trying to educate is skeptical. Eager to disprove her theory, Tom insists that she try hypnotizing him. The session worked, and only too well. Tom has become a receiver of messages from ghosts and is haunted by violent visions. When he demands an explanation from  his sister-in-law, she admits to giving him a post-hypnotic suggestion to open his mind to things he refuses to see, whatever they might be. Interestingly enough, not even she has any idea of the power and depth of the effect she helped create.

Tom is driven crazy by pursuing the meaning of his visions. His wife, even though given an explanation for what is happening to Tom, becomes estranged and frustrated, and we are left wondering where the answers will be found and how they will be reconciled.

Stir of Echoes seems to direct us against the popular adage "Be careful what you wish for". In the beginning, Tom is frustrated with his ordinary life, so he is given an opportunity to taste an extraordinary life. Then, he wishes he could go back to normal, but it’s too late. What was normal before isn’t any more, and Tom is driven to the edge of insanity while trying to get on top of his new world. The outcome makes us grateful that he got far more than he wished for. This reminds us again that if we are not challenged outside of our comfort zone, we will not grow.

Stir of Echoes is a great example of the power of visual storytelling. Tom's visions, part of what Robert McKee would call "the spectacle", are powerful and scary as befitting a horror film, but they not there merely to scare us. They are our direct link to Tom's state of mind. What we see is what he sees, and we should be scared by it, just like he is. We then use the story to step outside of our fear and seek understanding.

Watching Stir of Echoes or Sixth Sense might make one think how easy it is to make a great movie. It seems that way because great movies bring across powerful messages with the least amount of resistance on the viewer’s part. To use a part of an analogy from Stir of Echoes, a great movie is like having a flashlight in a tunnel. The stronger the flashlight, the easier it is to learn what’s in the tunnel and how to get through it. The weaker the flashlight, the more we need to struggle to find our way to the meaning.

If we are to take this movie as a commentary on our culture and our times, we glean interesting insights from it. We are not surprised when Hollywood exhibits waves of obsession with a topic or a genre. As much as the production executives avoid making similar movies, we are getting quite the opposite effect, as if some stories are so etched in our collective subconscious hunger that they force themselves onto our creative engines. For example, a few years back, there were two Wyatt Earp movies "Tombstone" and "Wyatt Earp". In 1997, we saw two major productions on volcano disasters "Volcano" and "Dante’s Peak". Last year, we saw two asteroid movies "Deep Impact" and "Armageddon".  This summer goes a little beyond coincidental repetitions. We saw five productions in the horror genre The Haunting, Blair Witch Project, Sixth Sense, Stigmata, and Stir of Echoes. The last three used horror to deliver strong messages of hope.

Another element to the summer’s horror fair comes through the gender separation in the five movies mentioned. Sixth Sense and Stir of Echoes, the two far more powerful movies, portray men being given the challenge of dealing with and comprehending the paranormal while the women are either skeptics or obstacles in their quest. The other three movies, in which women explore the paranormal world, don't leave us with nearly as clear a message.

In addition, in Sixth Sense and Stir of Echoes, not only are the men the ones with the quest of deciphering the unexplained, but they do so with the exclusion of the regular channels of authority like the police or the medical establishment, and without the help of any spiritual authority. Tom in Stir of Echoes even admits that no one would believe him, so he treads into the unknown stripped of any sense of safety that comes from external theory or solution. How is it that male energy is used as a vehicle to understanding the paranormal, new age ideas that are normally associated with female energy? Doesn't male energy usually manifest in skeptics and critical thinkers who debunk and knock down any unreal, unproven, intangible ideas? How do we interpret that male characters succeed in bringing us in touch with the new and the unexplained, and the female characters that attempt the same can’t quite manage to do that?

We are not hinting at female discrimination, although some may argue injustice that when women hold the unproven true, it’s nonsense, and when men do it, it’s revelation. We might perhaps consider that a male energy dominated world is expanding into the arena illuminated by the candle flame of female energy. Thus the once ignored finer aspects of our reality are now not only viable and important but even normal.