Horror Favourites – Jacob Estes

He’s Watching is a terrifying supernatural horror from Jacob Estes, the director of Blumhouse’s Don’t Let Go, and a gripping, original take on the found-footage horror genre. We managed to have a quick chat with Jacob who told us all about his favourite scary movie.

Siblings Iris and Lucas are home alone while their parents recover from a mysterious illness. Fending for themselves the two kids start a video diary to document their time and the deserted world around them. However, when they start to notice unsettling footage appearing that they haven’t filmed, Lucas and Iris soon realise that they have become the victims of something far more sinister than a virus…

Starring director Jacob Estes’ own children Iris Serena Estes and Lucas Steel Estes, He’s Watching incorporates pandemic-induced fears to push the found-footage genre in a bold new direction with this surreal and supernatural isolation nightmare.

Below Jacob Estes talks about the scary movie he loves the most:

“I’m partial to horror movies that are driven by their central characters needs and flaws, rather than by the melodrama of an outside force or invading evil. Though Kubrick’s The Shining has to do with a haunted house, it is also and more importantly about a haunted man—an abuser who, despite a desire for peace and tranquility, cannot escape the underlying fact that he is going to break peoples’ arms in any environment, whether it’s his non-haunted home down in the flats or a terrible hotel where a history of awful things shines.

There is a sense in The Shining –especially in the end when we see Jack Nicholson’s face amongst a historic photo hanging in the hotel where the story takes place –that our sins originate from the past, that we are inevitably hurtling towards that prelude. This is a deeply disturbing thought and one worth contemplating – can Jack Torrance, aka Jack Nicholson, escape from a past that is riddling him with anxiety and anger, or is he inevitably going to succumb to those demons again?

Character choice is central to The Shining – namely will Jack Torrance pick up the bottle again or will Wendy Torrance aka Shelly Duvall once again choose to accept her husband’s brutality or will she fight back— and yet stories like The Shining ask us to consider whether human beings have a choice in the matter of their own outcomes/plots or are they simply trapped in the neurotic labyrinth of their past?

A child’s life is at stake in The Shining but more precisely the future nature of his soul is at stake. Danny Torrance is a little boy who is both prescient about his father’s underlying horror, is a subject of his past and future potential abuse, and at the same time, most tragically, Danny is in danger of inheriting his father’s disposition for violence, both emotional and physical. In his ability to “shine”, as represented by Tony, his talking psychic finger, audiences can easily imagine that Danny’s father Jack was once like him – a vulnerable, overly sensitive child who himself was subject to abuse by his own father, later needing to repress that sensitivity with drink and trying to make sense of his history through art.

Though I make no claim that He’s Watching is some sort of Stanley Kubrick-Stephen King mega-brilliant masterpiece worthy of bowing down to and worshipping, when making He’s Watching, I did attempt to be mindful of The Shining’s lessons – evil is rooted in our historic past, evil is reinvented by characters making choices about whether to fight or else succumb to that past, and moreover evil migrates from parent to child as we pass on our own sins to our children…if we are not extremely careful not to.”

Blue Finch Film Releasing presents He’s Watching on Digital Download 17 October