Big Brother is Watching You…

Watching this year’s Big Brother and wishing they’d find a more extreme punishment for its contestants than just exploding suitcases and no hot water? Nina Romain casts an all-seeing eye over British horrors where an evil Big Brother controls its fictitious contestants with more success (and less survivors) to create an onscreen deeper level of disturbing….

With 2023’s Big Brother’s evictions steadily whittling down the contestants, you have to admit this social online experiment project, love it or hate it, has become an onscreen global phenomenon attention.  The idea of strangers trapped somewhere enclosed and online has been used in many horrors. The UK TV series Dead Set (2008) sees a fictitious version of the Big Brother house have its livestreaming plagued by a zombie invasion in a disaster strewn world, and surreally adds the real life host Davina McCall.

House of 9 (2005), another Brit horror with a slightly different set up, has the titular nine strangers wake up trapped in a sealed off house along the lines of an underground bunker. Horrified and disorientated in their burrow of antiseptic white marble, they hear a message from a disturbing, mechanised voice telling them they will remain there as part of a competition to win a huge cash prize of five million dollars.

The strangers – including one played by Dennis Hopper – rapidly turn on each other until only one survives and that person escapes from the trapped house, grabbing the bag full of the cash prize and hoping to finally get to freedom. But instead they find themself surrounded by another random group of strangers, all clutching the winner’s prize bag and thus all presumably desperate survivors, staring at each other in mute horror. The film neatly ends there.

Before either of these, 2002 indie horror classic My Little Eye, directed by Brit Marc Evans, portrayed another deserted house filled with strangers, this time somewhere in rural America. In true Big Brother style, this crumbling mansion is populated with five bright-eyed fame-hungry 20somethings who arrived at an unknown location for six months to compete for a huge prize.

The film opens with them desperately trying to be picked in their audition tapes with chirpy self-introductions along of the lines of: “Hi, I’m Emma, I’m 23 years old and I wanna come live in your house!” The bad-boy character Rex leads with the more direct: “I think I could stick to the rules for a million dollars, yeah!” The successful five wannabes morph grimly into desperate victims fighting for their lives in a winter nightmare world, as their Big Brother cuts off the heating in the “creepy-ass house”.

Evans also provides a deeper level of disturbance, by creating an intelligently-disturbing special edition which provides the movie as a livestream site you can “log on” to. Here you can hear the comments from the owners of the “site” who are simply called “the Company”.  They describe how they are “just me, Travis and some very rich clients,” looking for the next gullible 20somethings to exploit, as they explain they are always looking for some: “low-hanging fruit – always five suckers” to bet on how long they can survive.

Behind the scenes, we hear them barking orders like “Check camera 4”, switching off the heating or as a contestant recoils in horror at a disturbing message: “Oh dear, Emma, that upset you?”

As the grainy, blurry footage continues you hear the Company pull the strings and rig the contestants’ chances of survival as the switch of the heating in the middle of winter leaving the five freezing and desperate.

My Little Eye has dated amazingly well, creating a cinema verité horror curdling the five wannabees’ wide-eyed dreams of getting famous. The fight for their proverbial 15 minutes of fame leads to a battle for survival, where we see the five contestants realise far from their dreams of easy riches waiting for them, they’re in “a snuff site” with no way out now they are trapped in a snowy wasteland.

My Little Eye also has future A-lister Bradley Cooper in a fresh faced pre-fame role. In 2002, his small role involved him playing a good looking, affable dirty-blond stranger called Travis Patterson. He arrives in the house to charm his way in, claiming he was lost while skiing outside. The contestants don’t realise Travis is one of the Company who entered the house previously to switch off the heating, and dubiously welcome him in for the night.

After he has sex with one of the female housemates, Charlie, he stares directly into one of the house’s many cameras and whispers to the other Company members: “Told you I could f*** her” and then leaves. Neatly sending up his usual screen persona of lovable goofball, Cooper effectively plays Travis both as harmless guy-next-door when he’s in the house and smart psychopath pulling its strings outside it.

The final twist when the one contestant who acts as the nice-guy voice of reason finally turns out to be on the evil side and goes on the murderous rampage with an axe (which at least the original 2000 series featuring Nasty Nick didn’t) and beheads another member before moving on to Emma.

We see the five contestants get picked off one by one and hear the Company’s voices as they watch the murders happening real-time in front of them.  There’s an even more heartless meta-comment as when Rex keeps the light off to avoid detection at night: “And you wander around a dark house on a night like this…hasn’t the guy seen any horror movies?” You hear their triumphant whoop of “money shot!” at one of the final murders, and a screech of: “Just kill the bitch!” as a terrified Emma attempts to run to safety.

Although the film isn’t technically perfect – look for the scene where Travis is seen first outside in the snow but his breath isn’t visible as it was shot on a sound stage – it’s held up well. It’s mainly only dated by Travis’ early Noughties oversized brick-style phone, and the upload tech screech as viewers “log in” to the “site”.

Over two decades later, My Little Eye is as creepily plausible as it ever was and is still a powerful, creepy look at Big Brother-style horror. Watch and learn, all future “low-hanging fruit” chasing after their 21^st century 15 minutes of fame – as Orwell warned, Big Brother really is watching you.