Stir of Echoes; The Astronaut's Wife (1999)

It's hardly an occasion for melancholy, but Hollywood, to a startling degree, really fudged the millennium this year. I mean, where were the Y2K disaster thrillers? The nutzoid fundamentalist parables of spaceship Earth?

As it turns out, the closest the movies of 1999 may come to conjuring a millennial vibe is the shock current of supernatural horror that's now coursing through the zeitgeist. Audiences who are lining up for The Sixth Sense and The Blair Witch Project don't just want to be goosed. They want to get spooked into believing — into seeing a mystical next world that shapes and mirrors ours. It's the dance of the real and the unreal that creates that shivery frisson of pleasure. The Blair Witch Project psychs you into perceiving a mirage of terror within its secular electro-videotape facade, and The Sixth Sense, a cleverly orchestrated hodgepodge of The Shining and Ghost, never stops opening trapdoors to the possibilities beyond.

There are doors opened, as well, in Stir of Echoes and The Astronaut's Wife, two late-summer chillers that brim with omens and macabre twinkles: flash cuts from the dark side. Neither film relies on cheap jolts — at least, not too many of them. Both display an eager desire to disturb your sleep. Yet they both face skeptical audiences who, by now, have endured enough scare tactics at the multiplex to want their minds toyed with in intricate and deceptive new ways. These movies, despite fits of creepiness, are more like nightmare reruns.

In Stir of Echoes, Kevin Bacon, all sinewy and proled out, is Tom Witzky, a Chicago telephone lineman, married with a young son, who begins to lose his sanity — or so he thinks — after he playfully lets himself be hypnotized at a neighborhood keg party. From that moment forward, he is haunted by visions of an eerie, gruesome cataclysm (a bloody incisor, a clawing hand, the world seen as a crimson X ray) that come ripping into his mind's eye like images from a bad acid trip. Dominating these visions is the spectre of a teenage girl: lost and pale white, her black-rimmed eyes shining with ''Help me!'' paranoia. She looks like Linda Blair in The Exorcist, and the resemblance has the effect of both priming and dampening our anticipation. The film seems to be setting us up for some nasty business indeed, yet we can't help but wonder if it's going to be been-there-slaughtered-that.

Tom, it seems, isn't the only one with second sight. His little boy, Jake (Zachary David Cope), converses quite casually with an unseen presence. The snazziest thing in the movie is the way the kid stares into the camera, so that the audience literally shares the point of view of the uncanny. This kid who talks to ghosts invevitably recalls The Sixth Sense (the spirits here also bring frost to the air), and the coincidental motif, I'm afraid, doesn't favor the new film. There are purplish incidents of criminality and violence as well, most of which aren't nearly as gripping as they're meant to be. Take, for instance, the babysitter who comes over to the Witzkys' home to look after Jake and, in a rather overwrought scene, kidnaps the boy after she's heard his otherworldly conversations. Or the high school football star who whips out a gun and puts it to use.