Eye Catcher
2023 · 6m · USA
Directed by Jeremy Shipp
A woman unable to refill her anxiety medication grows convinced an evil presence is hiding in her home.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The medication-refusal angle is smart—it flips the haunted house into something weirder, a body-horror anxiety spiral where you're never sure if the presence is supernatural or just withdrawal—but the execution plays it too straight, treating ambiguity like a twist rather than the actual horror.
Shipp leans into the contemporary gothic tradition of psychological horror-as-social-commentary, though the film's formal restraint occasionally undermines the dread it's reaching for; there's craft here, but it sits just shy of the precision that would make this linger.
The brilliance is in the sound design—the way the ambient presence becomes indistinguishable from internal sensory glitches during withdrawal—and that single choice elevates what could've been a generic haunting into something viscerally disorienting on a shoestring budget.
Festivals
- Spooky Empire Film Festival 2023