It Needs Eyes

Directors - Zack Ogle, Aaron Pagniano

Zack is an award winning writer and director, best known for his work on Netflix's Dead Boy Detectives as well as his films We Got a Monkey's Paw and Death Has a Son. Queer as a three dollar bill, raised in Philly and based in Los Angeles, Zack enjoys using horror as a means to explore the everyday monsters that haunt us from the inside out.

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Aaron Pagniano is a festival award-winning, queer director/producer from Florida. A graduate of Florida State University, they believe that movies and tv can be a window into another world but, more importantly, they can provide a different perspective on this one. The thing they love most about filmmaking is the collaboration of various artists.

Director Statement

We’ve all had an odd obsession; well into the witching hour, slipping down a weird corner of the internet. Without warning, you accidentally go one click too far and see something you can’t unsee. There’s the immediate regret, the revulsion, but later that gnawing feeling “Why did I watch that? And why do I want to see more?”

When creating “It Needs Eyes”, we wanted to tap into this call of the void that so many of us have inside. Pairing that with themes of coming of age and passed-down familial trauma, we had long discussions about the kinds of videos that scared us as teenagers. We discussed how as young queer kids this was also a time we had become unmoored. Illusions of our parents being perfect have begun to fade while our identities and place in the world didn’t make sense anymore. We had each been hit hard with tragedies, and meanwhile the unexplored depths online made it all seem so big, so daunting, so weird. One could just as easily find a bizarre cartoon of a spoon-obsessed mutant as they could a genuine beheading…or worse.

A lot to pull off for $30k, but by keeping things tight in scope, big in theme & atmosphere, and scrappily convincing one of our parents to film at their house and surrounding cove area; we were able to exceed our budget and create something wistful, strange and deeply personal to the both of us.

Another major asset to make our world seem much bigger is the use of internet videos. In early screenings with friends, we would often get nervous questions about how much of what they saw was real. From self harm videos to Tiktok advice to original animated creepypasta, almost all of the videos in the movie were made by our friends, who are very talented filmmakers and internet personalities that answered the call when we reached out asking for “f***ed up videos”. What we received and got to use on set with our actresses was one of the highlights of this project.

Rowan’s journey is a twisty, occasionally lonely one. It’s about what happens when the people you come to rely on go away and you fall into the dark embrace of online entities. Above all her fatal flaw is simply wanting to know. About herself, her family, and about the steadily slipping world around her. If she could just find that one bit of information, maybe everything else would make sense. Sometimes growing up is realizing you’ll never know it all. There is true darkness lying in the deep, and you might never know why.