What was the point of eating and drinking?

Question

In Oculus (2013), Kaylie sets up a few alarms for her and her brother to perform various tasks. One of them is to eat and another is to hydrate (drink water). They were ~60 minute alarms.

I didn't recognize any explanation of why they had to eat and drink so often. I recall that Kaylie explained a few of the mirror's victims and the way they died, one was a woman who died in her bathtub of dehydration (even though she soaked for 3 days) and another gentleman who purchased the mirror at one time was over 300lbs but had been photographed later and was depicted as a very thin man. I believe he died as a result.

Other than that, I don't recall any explanation as to why they had to eat and drink so often. What was the point?

Answer 1

Why the alarms to eat and drink?

Kaylie learned from her research that some of the past owners of the mirror died from starvation and dehydration.

Why so often? (my personal interpretation)

Kaylie knows that the mirror is manipulative and the persons around it have delusions and lose control over time. She also believes that the mirror feeds on the life around it, so she experiments with a dog to prove it to her brother and we see that plants losing life and it also controls electricity.

Kaylie is being overprotective of herself and her brother. She believes that the mirror feeds on life (examples: experiment with dog, plants losing life). So, she might of thought it's best to eat and hydrate very often.

There's this review which you might find interesting. The reviewer says that all the safety measures Kaylie has taken are useless.

This mirror works primarily by messing with its victims' sensation of time and space. It makes you see things that aren't there, hear things that aren't real, and experience things differently from how they're actually unfolding. Sure, there's some sort of woman/demon/toothless ghost monster living in the mirror, but she doesn't seem to want to come out unless it is absolutely necessary. Normally, just messing with your perception does the trick. Which means there's a huge problem with Kaylie's "get over here and eat a granola bar" alarm strategy; it only works if Kaylie and Tim are lucid enough to hear it and understand what it means.

Answer 2

Kaylie Russell was very lonely in her adolescent years and she was too obsessed with the mirror. She studied all the deaths related to the mirror. She wanted to prove her point to the world by video footage but at the same time she wanted herself and her brother to be safe. So she just eliminated all the possible death reasons, such as dehydration, and set up a schedule to eliminate all the possible ways of death, such as setting up a food and water rationing plan.

Answer 3

If a profesional hears the story he might say that she was hallucinating because of dehydration or lack of food, the time schedules to eat and drink are to refute this argument against her theory (the mirror being a haunted object).

Answer 4

I think it's mostly to do with logistics, actually. The egg timers that Kaylie is using only go up to a maximum of 60 minutes, and there aren't really a lot of non-electronic timers that can be set for longer than that. If she's trying to prevent dehydration and starvation, it's better to eat too often than not often enough.