Anguish

• Made on a roughly $2 million budget, it was Bigas Luna's sixth feature and his second English-language film aimed at the American market, available in both English and Spanish versions.
• Though set in a Los Angeles theater, it was filmed entirely around Barcelona, Spain, the crew building a fake American street, complete with a U.S.-style cinema, signage and police cars, in a Zona Franca parking lot to pass as California.
• It opens with an in-house warning that the audience will be subjected to 'subliminal messages and mild hypnosis,' a William Castle-style gimmick advising anyone who feels their mind leaving their body to leave the auditorium immediately.
• Zelda Rubinstein, fresh off reprising Tangina in Poltergeist II: The Other Side (1986), plays the domineering hypnotist mother Alice opposite Michael Lerner as her eye-collecting son John Pressman.
• Snails are a recurring symbol of John's entrapment: his mother keeps live snails in a jar and pigeons in a cage in their cluttered apartment, telling him 'years ago you were like a snail. Hiding... happy...' as a metaphor for the infantile, confined life she holds him in.
• It opened in Spain on 25 March 1987 and pulled a modest U.S. theatrical gross of around $228,789, though video rentals later made it one of Luna's biggest worldwide hits.

The escalating layers are the whole point: Patty's terror in the theater is itself revealed to be a film someone else is watching, so the 'real' violence is just another screen. Anguish argues there's no safe outside frame, only the next pair of eyes in the next dark room watching the last set die.

The mother's hypnosis and the onscreen warning are the same machine pointed in two directions. Alice programs John through the optic nerve; the movie programs The Rex audience through the same channel. The eye-harvesting isn't only Oedipal horror, it's a literalized thesis about cinema feeding on the viewer's gaze and giving the spectacle back to a devouring mother-figure who is the screen itself.

John's failing eyesight is the spectator's condition rendered physical. He kills to keep collecting eyes he can no longer use, mirroring an audience that keeps staring at slaughter it can't look away from, the spiral of the snails marking a loop that only tightens, never breaks.

A nested doll of dread. Inside a Los Angeles movie palace called The Rex, an audience watches The Mommy, a film about John Pressman, a half-blind ophthalmologist's assistant whose hypnotist mother whispers him into harvesting human eyes. Then the trance bleeds outward: a real killer begins stalking the actual theater, murdering in lockstep with the screen. Bigas Luna keeps folding the frame until you no longer know which slaughter is the movie and which is the room you're sitting in. The eyes onscreen are always watching the eyes in the dark.