1999 was a big year for movies. It was the year that The Matrix‘s slow-motion bullet influenced action movies for years to come. It was the year American Beauty won Best Picture at the Academy Awards and Oscar fans have been arguing about it ever since. It was the year Pokémon jumped from Gameboys and TV to the big screen. And worst of all, it was the year that disappointed a generation of Star Wars fans with the release of The Phantom Menace.
To celebrate that landmark year in film’s 20th Anniversary, The Pop Break continues its year-long retrospective of 1999’s most influential (at least to us) films with writer, Josh B. Taylor, on an underrated horror film that got overshadowed, Stir of Echoes.
Twenty years ago, on this day, David Koepp’s Stir of Echoes was released in theaters. I don’t remember seeing trailers for its release, and around that time, my friends were still talking about how they believed The Blair Witch Project was real, & how terrifying The Sixth Sense was. It was a couple years after its release that a friend in high school told me about it, and I thought it was a recent film, only to find out this was released in 1999. One night, around the October Halloween season, I rented it from my local Hollywood video and finally checked this out.
I really enjoyed this film and thought it was one of Kevin Bacon’s best performances in a film. I wondered why I didn’t hear anything about this movie, so I did some research to see if it was a wide release, or how it did in the box office. On its opening weekend, the film ranked third with $5,811,664 and stayed in the top ten for three weeks. After a 14-week run, its total domestic gross was $21,073,708. A lot of reviews said it was great, but it was released shortly after other haunted/occult films (Blair Witch Project, The Mummy, The Sixth Sense), or overshadowed at the box office due to the release of The Sixth Sense.
With this film being “lost in the crowd” it seemed like it finally found its audience with the help of video stores, or at this day streaming services. It’s kind of ironic, The Sixth Sense was really popular during Stir of Echoes‘ time in theaters, so more people were talking about that, but now when I talk to some of my friends asking them about either this film or The Sixth Sense, they say they watch Stir of Echoes more. If it weren’t for my friend mentioning it to me, I don’t know when I would have discovered this film, but I’m glad I did. It’s a fun haunting film that I like to revisit often during the fall season, or save for a spooky horror movie marathon for the month of October. In celebration of this film’s release today, I high recommend people to check it out!
