Stir of Echoes Saw Dead People at Exactly the Wrong Moment

So, you make a fascinating paranormal thriller about a kid who sees dead people. Unfortunately, another fascinating paranormal thriller about a kid who sees dead people comes out a month before and becomes a monster hit. This is what happened to David Koepp. 25 years ago, the veteran blockbuster scribe (Jurassic Park, Mission: Impossible, Spider-Man) wrote and directed Stir of Echoes, a jumpscare-heavy adaptation of Richard Matheson’s 1958 supernatural novel A Stir of Echoes. The film got overshadowed by the massive success of M. Night Shyamalan’s career-launching picture The Sixth Sense, which had the then-babyfaced Haley Joel Osment serving as a mouthpiece for the dead.

The spooky-but-cute kid in Stir of Echoes is Jake (Zachary David Cope), the son of blue-collar couple Sam (Kevin Bacon) and Maggie (Kathryn Erbe). The boy befriends a teenage spirit (future House doctor Jennifer Morrison) who’s been shuffling around their abode. After Sam gets hypnotized by his occult-loving sister-in-law (Illeana Douglas), he begins getting nightmarish visions of their silent guest. Sam eventually goes on a maddening, dehydrating crusade to find out who this girl is and why he can’t get her out of his head.

Yes, Stir of Echoes is a suspenseful mashup of ghost story and murder-mystery. But, as usually is the case with horror films that keeps the gruesomeness to a minimum (though there are some gnarly moments involving loose teeth and fingernails), Stir of Echoes has other things on its mind besides scaring you. Koepp takes Matheson’s California-based story and plants it in a working-class Chicago neighborhood filled with football-loving average joes, still trying to live like wild, horny teens among actual wild, horny teens. (The film’s only problematic moment is when Maggie, with a pocket knife stashed in her purse, goes to a sketchy, mostly Black neighborhood to basically get exposition from a spirit-seeing cop, played by Jamaican actor Eddie Bo Smith, Jr.)

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By doing this, Koepp turns Stir of Echoes into a hard-luck horror show where Bacon’s reluctant receiver goes through an obsessive, possibly deadly midlife crisis. With a new mouth to feed on the way and his days of hanging out with pals at all-night kickbacks winding down, finding out what happened to this girl is his last chance to pull off something extraordinary, before eventually succumbing to an ordinary existence.

Stir of Echoes is also a film where the scariest characters are men whose aggression and savagery hardly gets reined in. Even Erbe’s all-too-understanding matriarch can’t seem to stop her husband from decimating their home in order to get to the truth. “Stir of Echoes tells a story about the dangers of male entitlement,” wrote Mark Naff in a 2021 essay on his Screenage Wasteland website. “In a scene where characters go to a football game, a male character brags about his son’s burgeoning football career, while the female characters talk about penises… The event that starts the story happens because male characters – both old and young – refuse to take responsibility for their actions.”

Released by the now-defunct Artisan Entertainment, which made a killing that summer with The Blair Witch Project, Stir of Echoes is another horror film from The Greatest Movie Year Ever™ that was less about carnage and more about cleverly crafting a decent, surprising scary movie. Koepp actually got some advice from previous, influential collaborators on how to properly pull off this project. Brian De Palma, who co-wrote his 1998 thriller Snake Eyes with Koepp, came by the set and gave Koepp some pointers on shooting certain scenes. Koepp also consulted with his Jurassic Park boss Steven Spielberg on how to patiently work with child actors.

In a Philadelphia Daily News interview, Koepp said he wanted to do a frightfest that didn’t descend into slasher madness. ”I know there are people who like them, but I’m not one of them,” Koepp said of slasher films. (“The horror movie’s idiot cousin,” he called them.) “I wanted to make a horror movie, but I wanted it to be in a much more believable, relevant context – one that people could immediately imagine themselves in.”

Koepp also said he wasn’t upset about The Sixth Sense stealing his thunder. “I would be worried if Blair Witch and Sixth Sense had come out and bombed horribly, but they’re both hits, and they demonstrate there is a large and eager audience for this type of material.”

Although it got favorable reviews, Stir of Echoes didn’t become an influential smash like The Sixth Sense. The $12 million movie only grossed $23.1 million. It spawned a sequel, Stir of Echoes: The Homecoming, that premiered on Syfy in 2007. In that one, Rob Lowe is the ‘80s heartthrob who gets spooked by a closure-seeking apparition, even enlisting help from a grown-up Jake (Zachary Bennett), who’s now a psychic in the film.

Koepp had nothing to do with that straight-to-cable flick, but he did make another ghost story, titled Ghost Town, a year later. Unlike Echoes, this is a rom-com, with Ricky Gervais as a cranky dentist who falls for the widow (Tea Leoni) of an obnoxious spirit (Greg Kinnear) who haunts him. He even reunited with Bacon for another psychological paranormal thriller, the Blumhouse-produced You Should Have Left, in 2020.

Even though bad timing prevented Stir of Echoes from becoming the scary success it should’ve been, it didn’t stop David Koepp from creating more movies where, to paraphrase Ray Parker, Jr., people ain’t afraid of no ghosts.

Craig D. Lindsey is a Houston-based writer. You can follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @unclecrizzle.

Stir of Echoes Saw Dead People at Exactly the Wrong Moment, 25 Years Ago