Anguish

Anguish (Angustia, 1987) is Spanish director Bigas Luna's horror film you can watch online on iFILM. It works on two floors at once: an audience sits in a theater watching a slasher — until the line between screen and seat starts to dissolve.

On that inner screen, a heavyset ophthalmologist's assistant named John murders strangers and harvests their eyes, steered by the hypnotic voice of his domineering mother. Zelda Rubinstein plays her, purring commands from far away; Michael Lerner is the son who obeys. Out in the real cinema, two friends watch — one thrilled by the carnage, the other sliding into panic and voices she shouldn't be hearing. Then the hypnosis bleeding off the screen stops staying on the screen.

Bigas Luna nested a film inside a film long before it became a fashionable trick, and pushed it to a claustrophobic extreme where violence seeps from the projection into the auditorium itself. The movie earned its cult on that gimmick and on one infamous eye scene. Not for the squeamish. Stream Anguish (1987) online on iFILM.