You never know who’s watching
February 3rd 2014,
a group of university students are returning from a concert, driving down an eerily
dark road. Charlie is driving the car with her boyfriend, Angus, sitting in the
front seat and her two close friends, Phoebe and Hugh sitting in the back.
Angus and Charlie are talking about the concert while Phoebe is drunk and
flirting with Hugh in the back, being loud and annoying everyone else in the
car. Charlie tells Phoebe to calm down, to which Phoebe replies “You need to
liven up a bit and stop being so serious” and puts her hands over Charlie’s
eyes. This causes Charlie to lose concentration and when Phoebe removes her
hands, she sees a figure in the road. After swerving to avoid the mysterious
figure, Charlie, Angus and Hugh leave Phoebe in the car to examine the
situation. After not finding anything, they return to the car to see that
Phoebe has disappeared. They presume that she has just walked home as she lives
nearby and they proceed to make their way back without her.
After dropping everyone
off, Charlie arrives home and discovers Phoebe’s body in the boot of the car,
eyes gauged out and missing. She fills with horror and realisation that her
friend has been killed and falls to the floor crying hysterically. A coroner
drives Phoebe’s body and a police officer tells a sobbing Charlie that she will
need to “come to the police station to make a statement”.
Next day at the local
police station, Charlie tells an officer the events that happened the night
before. He proves unhelpful to the situation and tells Charlie that the case is
already open for investigation after multiple crimes of the same offence have
occurred within the last year. Later that night, Charlie is experiencing
extreme insomnia after the events that occurred in the previous night so she
goes downstairs and takes some sleeping pills. Not long after, a banging is
heard at the door. Due to Charlie’s drug induced state, she quickly becomes
paranoid and grabs a knife as she approaches the door. She opens it to find
Angus, who has also been suffering from the same sleeping problem. The couple
sit down and talk about Phoebe and the situation that Charlie faced with the police
earlier that day and begin to research previous murders that have occurred
recently in the area. As they read through the different news reports relating
to these murders, they begin to see a pattern of victims having their eyes
ripped out. Due to their focus on reading these reports and getting worried,
they do not realise that Charlie’s dog is batting a human eyeball around the
room and chewing it. Charlie leaves Angus to go into the kitchen to make them
both a cup of tea, and as she does this, Angus feels as though he is being
watched. He is then approached and gagged by a mysterious figure as a
screwdriver is used to remove one of his eyes; Charlie remains blissfully
unaware of what is happening. The figure drags Angus kicking and screaming out
of the room and the front door is heard to slam shut, which draws Charlie’s attention.
Charlie jumps to the conclusion, however, that the situation has become too
much for Angus to deal with and doesn’t think too much of it.
One week later, it is the
day of Phoebe’s funeral and nobody has heard from Angus. Charlie is on the
phone to Hugh, expressing her concern of his whereabouts. Hugh comforts her by convincing
her that this is how Angus deals with grief, and that he’s probably just taken
a break and will be back soon, however, Charlie is furious as it seems likely
that he won’t even be attending one of his close friends’ funeral and says that
he is a “selfish jerk”.
“Let us commend Phoebe to
the mercy of God”, Charlie shakes her head and is visibly upset. The church is
filled with Phoebe’s family and close friends, tears in everyone’s eyes.
The coffin is lowered into
the deep hole in the ground. A cold breeze brushes past and Charlie looks
around confused and scared, she feels as if she is being watched and tells
Hugh. Hugh holds her hand and tells Charlie that everything’s fine and that he
won’t let anyone harm her. He holds her close and she sobs into his chest. A
dark figure is shown across the graveyard, but no one notices.
Charlie and Hugh are stood
in the church car park and it’s starting to get dark. Charlie hugs Hugh and
gets into her car and asks him if he’s sure he doesn’t want a lift. He tells
her that it’s fine; he only lives 5 minutes down the road. They smile at each
other and she drives off. Hugh leaves the church car park and a mysterious dark
figure emerges behind him.
Walking down a dark
alleyway, Hugh begins to feel paranoid, feeling a stare burning into the back
of his head. He hears footsteps behind him, gradually getting speedier, though
he doesn’t turn around. An extreme feeling of panic fills Hugh and he begins
walking faster, breaking into a jog. He runs to the end of the alleyway onto
his road, lit up by street lights. He quickly turns around and looks into the
blackness of the alleyway but there is no one there. Relief flushes through him
and he turns around and continues to walk towards his house. He takes a step
and feels something squidgy crush beneath his foot, letting out a grim,
squishing sound. He lifts his foot to find that he has stepped on a human
eyeball. Panic returns quickly as though it had never left and Hugh runs into
his house. He slams and locks the door behind him. Falling to the floor,
sitting with his back to the door, he cups his face in his hands and sobs.
Hugh is sitting in his
front room, drinking a cup of tea and trying to calm down. He stands up and
looks out the window towards his garden and sees his back gate swinging open in
the wind and a dark figure stands there. The gate blows shut and then open
again and the figure is gone. He runs and locks the door to the garden but as
he turns the lock, a cloth is placed over his mouth from behind and he passes
out.
Charlie is lying in bed
staring at her ceiling; she tries calling Angus but yet again is goes straight
to voicemail. She has given up hope. She calls Hugh to make sure he has gotten
home alright, and he answers, “Hey”. He assures her he has gotten home safely
and that there is nothing to worry about and that she should come round.
Charlie says she’s tired and she feels like she should sleep though Hugh insists
that she come. She gets out of bed, gets dressed and grabs her keys. Still on
the phone, she walks downstairs talking about the funeral and her concerns
about Angus and how she has given up on him. She goes on to say that she’s so
glad that Hugh has been there for her this last week and that she loves him for
being there and making her feel safe. We see Hugh sat in a chair, he isn’t
holding the phone himself but a figure is stood behind him holding it to his
ear. We see that Hugh is tied to a chair, his eyes are bleeding and that the
figure stood behind him is the dark figure. Hugh is seemingly moved by what
Charlie has just said to him and decides that he won’t continue playing along
with this murderer’s games. Back to Charlie again, he screams down the phone
telling her not to come, at which point a drill is turned on. Charlie is
horrified and runs to her car; she cannot let another friend be killed like
this. She stays on the phone telling him not to worry but shrieks of pain are
heard.
She pulls up outside his
house, runs out of the car and tries getting through the front door, but it is
locked. She runs round the back and is relieved to find that the gate is open.
She runs into the garden and tries the back door but it is locked too. She
looks through the window to the living room and sees Hugh tied to a chair with
a dark figure drilling into his eyes. Hugh is screaming in agony. Charlie is
crying hysterically. She watches in horror as the dark figure rips Hugh’s eyes
from their cords and holds them up to his face and turns to ‘look’ at Charlie.
Charlie turns around to run towards the gate but the gate is now shut and
locked. She starts to undo the lock but she feels a hand grab her shoulder to
pull her away from it. She falls to the floor, and is pulled by her leg towards
the house. She grabs onto a washing line pole preventing him from pulling her
any further. Angered, he turns around and plants a fork deep into her eyeball
and rips it out. She begins screaming in agony. Still gripping the pole, the
murderer takes another jab at her with the fork. He presses it deep into her
throat. She loses grip of the pole and continues to be dragged into the house.
She looks up at her murderer through her one remaining eye. A gunshot is heard
and the dark figure falls to the floor, losing grip of Charlie’s foot. She
turns and looks behind her, the garden gate is open and Angus is stood there
with a patched up eye, tears coming from the other one. He runs to Charlie and
hugs her as she bleeds out and quickly calls an ambulance. It’s too late
though; Charlie is unconscious and soon has no pulse. Furious, Angus turns
towards the dark figure’s dead body to take his anger out on him, but finds
that his body is gone. Sirens pull up outside and police enter aiming guns at
Angus. Angus tries telling the police that a man had been there and killed his
girlfriend and his friend but he’s covered in blood, brandishing a gun. He is
arrested and prosecuted as the murderer who had been ripping people’s eyes out.
A dark basement with shelves
on the walls stacked with jars of eyeballs. A dark figure places some more
eyeballs into a jar, puts the lid back on and places it on the shelf. A voice
over of a judge at a court case is heard during this scene, explaining the
motives that suggest Angus was the murderer. The voice explains that Angus had
reason to kill Phoebe due to risking his life when placing her hands over
Charlie’s eyes in the car. It is then explained that Charlie and Hugh were
likely having an affair after recovering their phones and finding that the two
had been texting more and more frequently within the last week, causing Angus
to kill Hugh, and then to kill Charlie. During the voice over, the scene
changes from the killer’s basement to a shot of Angus sitting in a jail cell.
The voice continues to sentence Angus to life imprisonment and a hammer is
heard.
