It Needs Eyes had its East Coast première at the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, 18th Oct 2025
It Needs Eyes opens with Rowan Paraiso (Raquel Lebish) standing frozen and staring blankly. She has just entered her home, and, still dripping from the rain outside, is immobilised by what she sees: a figure lying on the floor, just visible through a half-open doorway at the end of the hall. Rowan’s eyes slowly close.
“I just like to watch,” the sensitive 16-year-old will, a little later, tell Mella (Lydia Fiore), the estranged aunt with whom she is now staying in The Cove, Connecticut, while her father John recovers in hospital. These words are intended to reassure the tech-clueless Mella about the constant online activity of Rowan, who is glued to her smartphone and laptop – but the ‘primal scene’ of the prologue, and even the very title of Zack Ogle and Aaron Pagniano’s first collaborative feature as writers/directors, suggest that just watching can in itself be harmful, and leave scars.
After all, what Rowan saw in the opening sequence has left her traumatised, in a state of unresolved denial and derealisation – and as she tries to navigate her feelings and to find her feet in this new coastal environment, her resort to the internet will send her both searching down a rabbit hole that serves only to worsen her problems, and rowin’ to an island where her isolation becomes literalised. These rites of passage are going to be difficult and distressing.
Struggling to understand the world, Rowan filters it through a screen. Starting with a disturbing clip entitled “Guy On Roxys Loses His Shit” in which an obviously disturbed man (Benjamin Frankenberg) rants about being infiltrated by something hungry, reprimands the viewer’s desire for spectacle and then shoots himself in the head, Rowan begins to watch more and more ‘fucked up’ videos of self-harm and suicide, and finds that their imagery, like the earlier sight of her unconscious father, lodges in her addled mind and intrudes upon her offline life. She is attracted (in several ways) to the more assured and experienced Alex (Isadora Leiva) who lives next door, and their friendship soon turns to something else – but Alex’s status as a cam girl further confounds for Rowan the boundary between real and virtual worlds, especially when Alex makes one of their private moments indelibly public.
Meanwhile Rowan is also drawn to ‘Fish Tooth’ (Lola Blanc), a missing local actress whose estranged presence is spread and fragmented across weird clips buried deep in the web. “You can’t tell if it’s a movie or what,” Rowan says about one of the surreal videos featuring Fish Tooth, “but she feels out of place, like she’s not supposed to be there, like she feels – real.” No wonder that Rowan identifies with her, given that she readily projects on the actress what she is feeling about herself: a sense of alienation and disorientation in a scenario that never quite seems anchored in reality. In investigating what happened to Fish Tooth, Rowan is reaching out as one lost girl to another, and also seeking help for herself.
There are (at least) two ways that It Needs Eyes can be interpreted. On the one hand, it might be tracking the psychotic break of a sensitive young woman who increasingly drifts into conspiracy theories and paranoid delusions to make partial sense of truths she is unwilling fully to face. Or on the other, it concerns an outsider lured through the medium of modern technology into the supernatural trap of the tulpa Ash Man (played by J. T. Nelson, and voiced by co-writer/co-director Ogle who also, significantly, voices Rowan’s father).
Yet whether this is a psychological or a paranormal story, it remains unsettling and profoundly upsetting, as Rowan falls victim to local urban myth, family legacy, a series of personal betrayals, and her own demons. Most of all, though, this shows the way that the internet, always in need of eyes, attention and engagement, is its own kind of monster, devouring and exploiting the innocent, exacerbating the troubles of a vulnerable adolescent, and proving a horrific failure in loco parentis. This is horror for the age of creepypasta and QAnon (and Jane Schoenbrun’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, 2021), where online fantasies and fictions expand to haunt reality and ruin lives.
strap: Zack Ogle & Aaron Pagniano’s conspiracy horror sends an adolescent down a rabbit hole of post-traumatic delusion and online devilry
© Anton Bitel
