It Needs Eyes (2025)
Directed & Written by Zack Ogle & Aaron Pagniano
Starring Raquel Lebish, Isadora Leiva, & Lydia Fiore.

Horror

★★★★1/2 (out of ★★★★★)

DISCLAIMER:
The following essay contains
MINOR SPOILERS.
What you may see below
cannot be unseen.

Zack Ogle and Aaron Pagniano’s It Needs Eyes was one of the more haunting apparitions at Brooklyn Horror Film Festival 2025. The film centres on Rowan (Raquel Lebish), a troubled teen who has to move to the coast with her aunt (Lydia Fiore) after a shakeup in her personal life. She spends her time getting to know a teen cam girl neighbour Alex (Isadora Leiva), and diving headlong into the darkest corners of the internet, from videos of random beatings to more brutal, disturbing videos of self harm. Rowan also becomes obsessed with a local island near her aunt’s place, which goes by a number of names, and a mysterious actress from an old show, Fish Tooth. Her obsession, and the darkness in her own recent past, soon transport her to scary places from which she may not be able to return.

There was perhaps no film at BHFF ’25 more relevant to the current historical moment than It Needs Eyes because it confronts something that touches us all, not only young people, as we witness the protagonist struggle with an onslaught of horrific videos that aren’t even concealed behind the (thin) barrier between the regular internet and the deep web. Those of us with a heart and soul have been paying attention to the livestreamed genocide of Palestinians for the past couple years, much of it broadcast barely filtered through official social media platforms. Rowan seeks out many of the terrible videos she watches in the film, not unlike those of us who wish to stay informed about things like the Palestinian genocide and other sociopolitical issues. The trauma such images sear onto the psyche is what It Needs Eyes deals with directly. The film asks its audience: how much horror are we willing to watch, and what lasting effects will those horrors leave us with? Ogle and Pagniano force the audience to question not only the trauma these images inflict upon us, but also how our voyeurism, divorced from taking action against the cruelty captured in videos like the ones Rowan watches, shapes and warps the digital world.
One of the best parts about It Needs Eyes is how the internet and its algorithms are portrayed almost as Lovecraftian monsters with tentacles that reach out through our screens and grip our eyes, our minds, and our souls. When Rowan views a video of a man losing his mind, the man says: “It‘s like algorithms, they know what you want more than you know what you want . . . tells you what you want . . . and it keeps eating and consuming it all . . . its fingers, its tentacles . . . it’s everywhere . . . it‘s so fucking hungry.” The internet’s/algorithms’ tentacles and the effect on our eyes is portrayed in the film via a gruesome act of violence that doesn’t become apparent until the end when Rowan witnesses an unsettling entity and all the damage it has caused.

The way the film deals with Rowan’s voyeurism is one part her punishing herself for being frozen in the face of a traumatic moment involving her father, one part her attempting to understand why people commit acts of violence, particularly violence against themselves. We see, in a number of scenes, how various terrible images from Rowan’s internet exploration are superimposed over the background of her life, literally appearing on walls  around her while she’s just trying to live and go about her day. She’s forever haunted to the point the things she’s sought out online are infiltrating her physical world. The online images and videos she’s filtered through her eyes seep into the fabric of her soul, just as much as the tragic things that have happened to her and her family.

A major theme in It Needs Eyes is how the internet, horrific videos or otherwise, has disconnected us so much from everything—ourselves, each other, and culture itself. One hilarious yet depressing moment comes when Alex refers to a quote from a famous scene in Titanic and Rowan mentions the film, but Alex thinks Rowan only means the boat, replying: “I was just thinking about the memes.” We’re at this point in real life, where all kinds of aspects of culture have been lost to and absorbed by meme culture. Like Alex, many people don’t seem to know where a lot of cultural references come from, but they know phrases, images, or ideas solely from the memes about them. It Needs Eyes is ultimately all about the nasty consequences of being a voyeur; either a voyeur of our own life and experiences, or a voyeur only consuming media and not critically analysing it. Rowan becomes so alienated from her own life, and reality itself, that her consciousness merges with the digital world, suggesting that, in the end, she’s completely untethered from the world of flesh and blood, her loved ones, and her sanity.