Anguish () is a 1987 Spanish-produced horror film directed by Bigas Luna and starring Zelda Rubinstein, Michael Lerner, Talia Paul, Angel Jove and Clara Pastor. Plot In the Los Angeles theater The Rex, moviegoers watch the film within a film, The Mommy. The Mommy tells the story of John Pressman, an extremely myopic, uncontrolled diabetic who works as an ophthalmologist's assistant and is progressively growing blind. For unstated reasons, his overbearing mother Alice hypnotizes him and induces him to murder people so that he can remove their eyes and bring them back to her. One evening, John—against his mother's wishes—barricades himself inside of a movie theater playing The Lost World, where he sets about killing the patrons one by one with a scalpel. Once John's rampage becomes apparent, the surviving moviegoers attempt to flee the now sealed-off theater. The police bring Alice to the theater in an attempt to end the siege; in the course of trying to talk John down, Alice is accidentally shot to death by the police. The last scenes of The Mommy show John being placed into police custody and a detective looking upon Alice's corpse one more time. As The Mommy wears on, patrons of The Rex begin to experience anxiety attacks and disorientation in response to the events onscreen. In particular, one man grows progressively agitated, constantly checking his watch; and a teenage girl, Patty, begins to break down in tears, though she cannot entirely articulate her fear. At a key point in the film, the man exits the theater and approaches the concession stand, where he's recognized by an employee as a frequent patron of The Mommy. Patty's friend, Linda, goes to use the bathroom moments later, and witnesses The Man removing a gun from his jacket and killing the concession worker and another theater employee. The Man drags their bodies to the bathroom—an act synchronized with John killing a woman in the bathroom of a movie theater in The Mommy. Linda escapes the theater and stops a man passing on the street, whom she asks to call the police. In The Rex, the man barricades the projectionist in the projector booth and then slips back into the theater, where he holds Patty at gunpoint and begins reciting dialogue from The Mommy. When John Pressman begins his theater rampage onscreen, the man begins indiscriminately shooting patrons of The Rex, using Patty as a