10 More Perfect Horror Movies You've Never Heard Of

Director Mike Flanagan may be horror royalty these days, but back in 2006 he was making low-budget short films in an effort to get studios and financiers to take a gamble on him in the big leagues. Amongst these projects is the fantastic mouthful, Oculus: Chapter 3 -- The Man with the Plan.

In an effort to prove that an antique mirror (known as the Lasser Glass) has been responsible for a string of deaths, murders and suicides throughout the ages, Tim Russel (Scott Graham) sets up shop in a bare room, with just himself, three cameras and the mirror itself. While his intricate series of alarms and checks designed to keep him present initially seem to work, time begins to slip away from Tim and soon he's at the mercy of whatever lives within the mirror's reflection.

Originally intended as part of a longer anthology of horror shorts telling the tale of the film's supernatural MacGuffin-cum-antagonist the Lasser Glass, Oculus: Chapter 3 was instead scaled back to a tight, single-room, single-sequence film, and boy does it ever benefit from it. Flanagan makes creative use of the three camera, three monitor setup, weaving confusion and temporal instability into the film's fabric with only one actor and, for the most part, a normal mirror. Far greater than the sum of its parts, Oculus manages to be scarier than most feature horrors with 1000x its budget -- and it ultimately helped get feature film Oculus made seven years later.