Mirror Mirror (1990) reflects its time – that hazy late-80’s twilight zone when the Satanic Panic gave way to At-Risk Youth, and horror stopped blaming the Devil and started exploring psychological damage.
But let’s rewind, because by the time this one hit video store shelves, genre films had spent decades asking the same question: “What the hell is wrong with kids today?” The answers evolved, but the moral panic stayed the same.
And somewhere along the way, kids started enjoying it.
There’s catharsis in being the villain of the piece – in watching the shy girl snap, the loner fight back, the victim pull the pin. Some of us didn’t want to be saved. We wanted to be Carrie. Not the Nancy Allen character.
In the 60s, the generational angsts were external. From Village of the Damned to It’s a Good Life, it was dealing with children who weren’t quite children – they were a cool, calm, collective. Aliens, maybe. Communists, definitely. The horror wasn’t rebellion but obedience to something the straights didn’t understand.
Then the 70s brought the fear home. Carrie. The Omen. The Fury. Youth counterculture was everywhere, and it was powerful, while religion was slipping. The kids weren’t a new world order anymore – they were hormonal, unstable, Godless. The fear was that our permissiveness had created a whole generation that was indulgent, entitled and virtually punishment-proof.
In the 80s, the devil got in the details. The danger wasn’t who kids were but what they consumed. Evilspeak typed incantations into an Apple II, Fade to Black gave a film nerd a kill reel, and Trick or Treat unleashed a demonic rocker through a metal album. Christine made codependency lethal. If the 70s blamed the kids, the 80s blamed the “MTV video games.”
Video nasties, heavy metal in Walkmans, trash tv… The poor innocent darlings were being corrupted.
But by the end of the decade, the fear changed again. Sally Jessy was on daytime and pop psychology was pop culture, so horror started asking: What if they’re just broken? Damaged? Repressed? The fear was that the yuppies had raised a generation of time bombs.
That’s where Mirror Mirror lives. No exorcism. No holy water. Just a cursed mirror and an awkward goth girl who finally sees herself clearly. Lisa doesn’t descend into madness – she slides into it like it’s hers to play with. The mirror doesn’t so much corrupt her as validate her. Her anger gets reflected, and all that passive parental damage comes into sharp focus. It’s the logical end point of a decade raised on self-help paperbacks and talk-show confessionals. Heathers had already taken that first shot the year before, and this movie looked to finish the job.
By the 90s though, the masks were off. The Craft. Scream. Ginger Snaps. Even Buffy. The kids weren’t trying to be good – they were rewriting the terms. Gender? Fluid. Morality? Situational. Popularity? Irrelevant. The fear wasn’t that they’d turn bad but that they didn’t care about being “good” anymore. Possession was old news.
Now the kids were just… done with all that bullshit.
Mirror Mirror isn’t about what got into her – it’s the possibility that nothing did, that she was just waiting to happen.
Maybe it’s not the Maybelline, maybe she was always like this.
And maybe we were just too scared to look. -Pop