10 Horror Movies Where The Villain Is A Supposedly Inanimate Object

Golden boy of the contemporary horror scene Mike Flanagan developed his first seriously-funded flick Oculus from his 2006 short-film chamber piece Oculus: Chapter 3 -- The Man with the Plan. While this movie and its low-budget predecessor don't share an awful lot between them, they do have one defining element in common: their villain, the Lasser Glass. Spoiler alert: it's a mirror.

Oculus sees Kaylie and Tim Russell (Karen Gillan in her first Hollywood role, cast thanks to Flanagan spotting her on Doctor Who; and Brenton Thwaites) go up against the mirror in a battle of wits that might seem comical if it weren't for the mirror's ability to control human perception. Thus, as the big shiny antique stands silent and sinister in the corner, the people around it unwittingly harm each other, put themselves in mortal danger and, in one particularly hard-to-watch scene, take a bite out of a big, juicy lightbulb.

Simultaneously a classic cursed object feature and meditation on mental health and generational trauma, Oculus covers a lot of ground in a short time. But, while we know for sure the Glass is haunted and evil and storing images of its victims like pirated movies, there is never a conclusive answer on how or why it came to be like this.