Voyeurism has long played a pivotal role in horror storytelling, with seminal classics like Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) and Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960) placing voyeurs front and center, albeit with starkly different perspectives. Whether we’re looking through the lens of a nosy neighbor or a stalking killer, horror has had much to say […]
Voyeurism has long played a pivotal role in horror storytelling, with seminal classics like Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) and Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960) placing voyeurs front and center, albeit with starkly different perspectives. Whether we’re looking through the lens of a nosy neighbor or a stalking killer, horror has had much to say about people’s fascination with observing the lives of others, especially when what we’re witnessing is private, taboo, and/or outright horrifying.
Films like Someone’s Watching Me (1978), Fright Night (1985), Eyes Wide Shut (1999), Disturbia (2007), and The Rental (2020) have underscored this ongoing fascination for decades, with the narrative and stylistic approaches to voyeuristic genre stories also evolving in their own right.
In the last half-century, the found footage subgenre has uniquely established itself as a medium through which voyeuristic stories can take on an even more effective tone of realism. This is especially true in the subset of found footage films told through the first-person perspective of a killer. Entries like The Poughkeepsie Tapes (2007), the Creep franchise (2014-present), Hangman (2015), and Be My Cat: A Film for Anne (2015) fall into this category, placing consumer-grade cameras directly in the hands of killers as they document their methodical stalking and murders in real-time. Without the sheen and predictability of traditional studio filmmaking approaches, found footage films framed from a villain’s perspective can be especially unsettling in execution–and the disjointed footage, amateur camerawork, and unpredictable narrative turns typical of the subgenre certainly deepen the sense of realistic dread.
Jason Zink‘s Looky-loo takes a page from these particular approaches to found footage horror and voyeurism alike. Written by Nolan Mihail, Looky-loo is a story told solely from the first-person perspective of an amateur filmmaker (credited as ‘Looky-loo,’ Zink himself) who spends his time following and filming women around his city, seemingly in the name of art. However, when the filmmaker sets his eyes on Courtney (Courtney Gray), his voyeuristic curiosity takes a dark turn and he begins murdering his subjects, all in the hope of making Courtney his twisted film’s leading lady.