When horror spoofs itself — sacre bleu! — French director Alexandre Aja gets mad.

"I think what will kill the genre again will be what killed the genre in the '90s, which was the 'Scream' kind of movies," he says.

Aja is doing his best to see that it doesn't happen. He makes seriously gory stuff. This time, he has turned his gaze from the cannibal mutants of his 2006 hit "The Hills Have Eyes" to malevolent looking-glasses in "Mirrors," opening today.

Kiefer Sutherland plays a department-store security guard whose reflection turns evil in a chain of events Windex can't wipe away. One scene anticipated in fan-geek circles is as advertised: Amy Smart, as the sister, stares into the bathroom mirror and rips her mouth open until her jaw plops into the bathtub. Aja's joy in creating the moment is palpable. It is so disgusting, so un-French, he concedes. France's appetite for scary movies is about the same as our appetite for escargots: an acquired taste that is acquired by few.

Yet Aja, the son of director Alexandre Arcady and TV film critic Marie-Jo Jouan, says he found himself magnetized as a boy by movies such as "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," "Halloween" and "The Shining."

Aja (whose show-biz last name is derived from his initials) adores American cinema, especially from the 1960s-80s. And censorship here — more accepting of violence than sex — plays to his strengths. He says his only battles with American studios have involved the extent of amour.

Aja believes he is on the vanguard of protecting against the re-softening of horror. He used to lean more toward the supernatural, but his zest for its bloody manifestations grew. "Mirrors" let him dole out copious servings of the spiritual and the grotesque.

As long as he conjures fears that we cannot avoid — of the unknown depths a la "Jaws" or simply our own selves staring back at us in his new movie — he figures he has us hooked.

"We all have a relationship to mirrors," he says. "How many times a day is a human being going to look at himself into a reflection?"

While he says new developments relieve his fears that the genre will reach the saturation point or be slashed again by goofiness, he doesn't plan on being all guts and gore forever.