‘Looky-loo’ Review: Perfect Voyeuristic Found Footage For The Digital Age
Being a woman sucks. Every woman I know has at least one story about being followed home by a stranger, aggressively harassed on the street, or getting groped on public transportation. We live a life with an undercurrent of anxiety, trying to be hypervigilant enough to keep ourselves from the myriad of creeps in our world. And Jason Zink’s (Straight Edge Kegger) peeping tom found footage nightmare Looky-loo perfectly and upsettingly captures that anxiety. It’s a contemporary The Poughkeepsie Tapes that provides a deeply disturbing look into the mind of a serial killer that feels more like a snuff film than a horror movie. And if you’re a freak like me, that’s a very exciting thing.
Looky-loo is told entirely from the perspective of our unnamed peeping tom who films himself finding, stalking, and murdering his victims. It’s supposed to just be a movie-making project, but it morphs into something much more sinister. Zink plays our character, holding the camera, but barely speaking. It’s simply breathing, some quiet giggles, and the screams of his victims when he decides to pounce.
Zink and writer Nolan Mihail take John and Erik Dowdle’s The Poughkeepsie Tapes and strip it down to its terrifying bones: the footage filmed by the faceless psychopath. There are no crime experts in Looky-loo trying to explain this man’s pathology. This is just a record of one man’s lunacy, obsession, and desire to dominate the female body with both a camera and a knife.
Also Read: ‘The Home’ Will Leave Your Stomach In Knots [SXSW 2025 Review]
The shocking simplicity and chilling cinematography make Looky-loo something special. This is a found footage movie that understands that less is more in the vein of The Blair Witch Project. While we don’t learn much about our killer, Zink and Mihail want it that way. They don’t want the viewer to empathize with this guy or understand him beyond the fact that he’s a freak who thinks he can control women’s bodies just because he wants to.
Looky-loo is a rare film directed and written by men that accurately and respectfully captures a manifestation of every woman’s deepest fear: being stalked and watched from the shadows by a strange man. While every second of the film makes your skin crawl and it feels like something ripped from the darker corners of the internet, Zink and Mihail keep it from falling into exploitation. This is nothing like August Underground. It’s terrifying without needing to revel in the actual violence itself, illustrating a delicate and nuanced balance in Mihail and Zink’s approach to their found footage nightmare.
This is a stunning example of how to do simple yet effective found footage in the modern era. To describe Looky-loo will never do the visceral experience of watching it justice. If you want to feel dirty and like you need a shower after you watch a movie, seek this found footage title out ASAP. It’ll have you double-checking you’ve locked all your doors and windows…
Looky-loo is available now on Blu-ray and VHS from Scream Team Releasing.
Summary
‘Looky-loo’ is a contemporary The Poughkeepsie Tapes that provides a deeply disturbing look into the mind of a serial killer that feels more like a snuff film than a horror movie.
Categorized:Reviews
