User Reviews

I would really very much like to speak to the filmmaker. I'm just very curious as to what his interpretation of his own film is. Because from opening credits to closing credits we thought we knew what he was trying to say. But along the way got convoluted, and lost.

I admire anyone who has the temerity to complete an artistic endeavor. But there was too many paranormal tropes used along the way that really made things hazy. It felt like found footage, but there was a lot of omniscient camera work. There was demons and a pandemic. It tried too hard I guess.

This film was not so bad that it was worth watching. But it was definitely not good enough to have watched the whole thing. But we did watch the whole thing, and are still very confused. I don't know if it's an experience with writing, or a budgetary thing But "He's watching" and I wished I hadn't.

While this movie is by no means BAD, simply low budget, it isn't meant to be a found footage movie. It just had to be one due to not having the money needed to do what needed to be done.

I'm a found footage fan so this didn't work for me but good effort. Good acting (for children), original ideas and a few genuine scares but it just tries to do and be too much. The found footage aspect just can't accomplish everything they wanted to do here.

The camera work is good, the house is creepy and lit well and there are no real "mistakes" to speak of. Just artsy, odd choices and a lack of means to pull everything off. Also the ending is going to be hard to understand for some.

It's really a 3 but I'll add an extra star for trying so hard.

There are some clear signs that a movie is going to be garbage if you pay attention to some subtle (and not so subtle) signs, and this one had them in spades. From the first 10 minutes, it's easy to realize that it was made of in "found-footage" style because they didn't have the budget to make a "real" movie. Not a deal breaker, but it gets worse. The movie switched from FF, to third person, to something like fourth-person (an "invisible" being recording everyone at the same time?) and I just didn't understand the underlying pathology behind this kind of filmmaking. If you wanted to make a movie and you could only afford an iPhone and your own family members as actors, why not just go full steam ahead? Why try to interject horrible segments of art-house, mixed in with misguided attempts at making some of the film appear like it isn't even FF? It's just a mess from the ground up, and I didn't get it, I didn't care for it, and after 40 minutes I just decided to stop wasting my time and turned it off. Honestly, I should have done it at the 20 minute mark but I wanted to see just how bad it was going to get. Glutton for punishment and all that.

I should have known this was going to be trash when I saw the political "Kick the GOP" bumper sticker on the youngest sons bedroom door. Then you see the feminist literature all over the house and it cements this very fact. I'm going to be paying even closer attention to these little details from now on, just so that I can identify these garbage productions and save some time and energy by not giving them any of mine.

The movie gets 3 stars because the two child actors weren't terrible. That's it.

Ignore this movie. It's not worth anyone's time or patience. It's the type of movie that will be forgotten and never be spoken of again, as it shouldn't be.

The movie had its share of creepiness and started out interestingly enough, but then it strolled out into left field and made no sense. Hard to follow. Random scenes and images, then they attempt to explain in the end but still leave you very confused at the roll of the credits. Seems like it tries to be too artsy-fartsy at times. I just like a good horror story! This one tries to hard to be artistic, definitely like its coffeehouse horror. I want my $7 back!!

This is easily one of the worst horror experiences I have ever had in my entire life. This is so genuinely awful and so genuinely disappointing that if the reviews on this website went into the negatives. I would give this the lowest amount of starts humanly possible. It is a unbelievably slow hour and a half of suffering. I would rather take a beating than watch this movie again. The characters are so annoying throughout the entire film which made me really not care about them. It legitimately killed me from boredom several times throughout because of the lack of things that are interesting actually happening. I will give this movie one thing. You can finally applaud once the credits role. Because you will officially be out of your suffering.

If I could give this movie a zero, I would. There is absolutely nothing here to watch but a montage of images. I thought it would be a good scify horror movie based on the premise that adults are being wiped out by a virus but the children are unaffected. But that premise was given up after 15 minutes. Instead you have 2 children living in a house for what seem like months, wondering how their infected parents are and getting on each others nerves. And my nerve. The little boy playing a piano badly made me grab the remote and start fast forwarding. You think that there is someone entering the house, but there isn't. This movie has no plot or meaning. If you are scared at seeing static on a television, then you'll be scared of this movie. Give this movie a HARD PASS and instead watch "White Noise" with Michael Keaton if you want to see static on the television.

The acting was mostly good. Some freaky parts. Kind of like a weird nightmare that you would have after being sick. Good attempt but never gave us anything worth holding onto. Didn't understood the ending. They could have done so much more to make a cool ending to at least let us have a resolution that everyone could understand. That would have made the wait worth it but unfortunately they didn't do that. I think both of the young actors can definitely be in more movies. They are really good. After all they carried an hour and a half movie. Overall I would say to skip this. Not really worth the time.

I absolutely love horror and have watched some pretty terrible horror movies and this takes the cake BY FAR. This movie absolutely sucked. Me and my boyfriend were laughing at how terrible it was. We turned it off about half way through because we were so bored and the "scares" were cheap. But I turned it back on because I wanted to give it a chance since I paid for it and it failed miserably. It made zero sense and didn't even give a conclusion at the end so you're just left being confused as to what tf you just watched. I literally felt like I lost brain cells after. We sat there in silence for about 5 minutes after just shaking our heads and laughing. DO NOT WASTE YOUR TIME.

If Blair Witch and David Lynch had a baby....sort of. Lots of great filmmaking techniques here. The story is a bit confusing, and there are unanswered questions, but worth watching for the style alone.

I'm not a huge found footage fan, generally because of the premise leading to the filming. This one seemed promising, kids making a video diary for sick parents in hospital. Initially it wasn't bad, but about half way through there's an art house fever dream & nothing is really right from there. It 90% abandons the found footage idea, making it disjointed and illogical, with a weak semi explanation. It throws random ideas at the wall & includes what sticks, even if it doesn't make sense. It does try to explain things but even the explanation is weak & illogical. Like grasping at straws because they needed an ending.

Don't even get me started on the other, background story, which frankly wasn't utilised the way it could have been. It was there for... Drama? To throw us off? I don't know.

This script needed a few more goes over by an editor to make it cohesive & picking a genre to stick with would have helped a lot.

Disappointing all round.

A lot of hate for this title from the FF community. On one hand it's understandable because He's Watching is NOT really a Found Footage movie. But on the other hand, it's something much weirder and arguably even better.

The idea behind this movie is that it starts out as a pretty standard found footage flick, but sort of snowballs into (basically) a demon using found footage and electronic recording to communicate and disrupt the lives of two teenage children. If you've seen Benson and Moorehead's "The Endless," this is a very similar concept of a monster creating found media to communicate, just taking it into the natural next stage of presentation.

The only real issue that I had with this movie is the angle of the pandemic. As I understand it, this movie was shot during COVID-19 lockdowns, and in the film the two main children are home alone because of a mysterious virus that targets adults and has left their parents hospitalized. Chalk it up to pandemic fatigue, but I didn't need this movie to be stapled to a real-life event. It just came across as distracting.

But this is one of those FF movies that is more about the feeling of FF than the logical machinations to justify FF. As much as I like FF movies that have a compelling reason to keep the camera rolling, when filmmakers go in the COMPLETE opposite direction I think it's just as exciting. Give this one a shot!

This movie had genuinely scary parts but goes a little off the rails in the second half. Still worth watching IMO. Yes it goes into student art film for a bit however I genuinely liked most of it.

For a home movie --as the end credit says this is-- "He's Watching" is not as terrible as some claim. It's interesting because it's a family project, between a filmmaker dad, a singer mom, their two children, friends and neighbors, made during the global quarantine of the pandemic, but, to be honest, it's annoying or maybe worse. "He's Watching" is so hackneyed and puerile, that I ended up finding it... bad. At least, for 45 minutes I was watching gratuitous subjective shots and hearing amplified noises and pseudo music, putting together a very silly story of obnoxious demons, which I finished watching up to an even sillier ending, with all the solutions given by a know- all little boy (Lucas, played by Lucas, the director's son). Well, that silly we the audience can also be...

I sincerely believe that good horror movies are not being made in the United States. Times have changed, but the formulas have not. They are very archaic and basic; but even in this sense, this type of cinema with diabolic entities and the like has better authors in the East. It seems there is no more advanced understanding of what fear is, of its more sophisticated variants, closer to real experience, to true fear. The irrational fear that arises from ignorance... It is not here. It is an accumulation of sound and visual effects that add up to little.

And I don't know... the reactions of its own American audiences are very strange. Given a sophisticated and elegant version of the root of fear through a ghost story (as «I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House»), an aggressive pack rips it apart. If they give them an artifact like this, a typical film product of Los Angeles, they also despise it. Therefore, I think I am not so clueless when I recommend that we should watch horror films from other places and industries, at least to refresh our mind a bit, give the goats and reverse stars a vacation, and see other disturbing options, in search of the root of real fear in each of us.

I'm rating this a 4 purely because it had some decently creepy stuff. I did not understand what was happening for most of the movie. It felt like someone was bored during the pandemic, gathered a bunch of people (who know maybe very basics in film) and then started filming and created a semi plot after the footage was filmed. Some of it made sense and then anytime I thought I figured it out, I was back to being confused. If it weren't for the fluff that filled the first half of the movie, it would have had a lot of potential to be a great movie. Just needed some help. It lacked direction and had some major plot holes.

I watched this because it had a high RT score but the audience score was pretty low. I gave it a chance and I can say there was a moment or two in the beginning that was unsettling and I thought I was in for a treat. Unfortunately the film loses its way. Not sure if it was trying too hard to be an art film or simply downright weird. Either way it failed miserably. I was lost in the mess and what's worse is I no longer cared about any of it. It meandered on and I became more disinterested. It truly was a great idea and may have been better with a more straightforward approach. This was recommended to me on a found footage movie list. Not sure if it should be considered found footage. Whatever the case, its a hard pass that I could never recommend.

It had me thinking this is what Skinamarink should have been, it's just a shame it didn't have a higher budget as the story and execution was actually pretty decent and with a bigger budget, it would have removed the cringey cheesy parts.

For a film made by a family during the pandemic, you can tell they had some decent ideas that were likely cooking around in one of their heads for a while.

It gets very very weird too. Some parts were good and creepy, others looked awful and hilarious.

The only thing that annoyed me about the plot was the boy putting things together. The things he realises, I doubt anybody in the whole world would have been able to realise. He sees a lock for example and says "that must mean everything is set in stone".

That's one of the simpler connections he makes.

Give it a watch and see what you think. I like weirdness so I was happy with it.

I'm a huge fan of low budget and no budget horror movies. I've seen a lot and most of them are garbage. But every so often you come across one like "RWD," "There Are Monsters," "Raccoon Valley," "Resolution," or "Interior" that just shocks you with what you can do with a small budget

I went into this one with very low expectations but "He's Watching" has blown me away. A truly creepy film and yes, it does get really weird. I see in other reviews that has turned people off. But the weirdness works. The two leads are fantastic and that's another anamoly: the family of the filmmaker can actually act!

I really enjoyed this film. It was creepy, entertaining, and will stick with me. I will never look at a hammer in a bath tub the same way again.

I'll just start by saying this isn't a 10-out-of-10. But, at the same time, anyone giving this film 1 star either hasn't watched anything but Hollywood blockbusters, or is so repelled by low-budget indie films that they're blinded to any actually talent those films may show.

I haven't looked into the production, but I'd guess this film was made on a maximum budget of about $300.

That's not a criticism.

It's unconventional and, in places, what people may call "arty". Then again, there are moments that seem overly familiar or even formulaic.

All that said, there is a lot to admire here, and I don't think I've ever seen anything quite like It. I was reminded of Skinamarink - another much maligned film - in some moments, but this is a very different movie.

If you're expecting a Found Footage film, this is not it. It uses a lot of FF conventions but it's really not trying to fit into that genre.

It's not without it's flaws, but I think a lot of reviewers here have just seen how low-budget it is and written it off, but that sells it VERY short.

The acting from the two young leads is brilliant. I hope they both have much success as actors in the future because I absolutely believed their performances in this and they're both clearly talented.

The plot was mostly orginal, and clearly a procuct of the Covid pandemic. I won't drop any spoilers but, while it clearly took inspiration from other things, this was not at all derivative.

In terms of referencing the pandemic, I think films and stories like this will really start to show their significance in a few years when we can properly look back on that period from the outside.

So, TLDR: An ultra-low budget, essentially amateur film, but with excellent acting and unique style. If you're capable of appreciating a film regardless of its budget (which, clearly, many other reviewers I here were not), you may really get a kick out of this.

I really enjoyed this and it was thoroughly unnerving at parts. The kids were great and the reveal at the end ... Overall got me thinking about art made during/after the pandemic.

"He's Watching" is a family art project elevated to a level of cinematic mastery I didn't think possible with only an iPhone and a pen light. The creep level is high, the jump scares are many, the visuals are psychedelic, and the ultimate reveal is inspired. But what really sets this apart is the character development, which is rooted entirely in the sibling relationship between the leads - who are, it should be noted, really brother and sister. Their natural chemistry and comedic banter lend a level of naturalism that is usually absent from horror films, and both the love and animus between them are palpable enough to drive the story forward. I cannot recommend this film enough, both as an entertaining horror movie with unusual depth and an artistic expression of family, fear, and the lessons of an isolating, horrific pandemic and its effects on our collective psyches.

Personally I loved this movie. It was super well done and it just worked. I was thoroughly creeped out start to finish. I walked into this completely blind and was surprised at how unnerved I was. I'm leaving a good review because you never know if he's watching. There were some really spooky elements and it was super effective. I cannot recommend this enough. I really want to go watch it again but in a way i'm still recovering from the first watch experience. I love the family involved movies. They produced and directed and acted in their own creation. This goes right up there in my must watch recommendations of the year. Do yourself a favor and check it out.

I'll be honest I had no idea what to except. Someone said watch it with googling what it's about and that's exactly what I did. 30 minutes in I felt like I wanted to turn it off, didn't know where it was going. After I spoke those words things happened. Definitely picked up.. Kind of reminded me of Blair witch without given me the headache. Acting was great and believable. This low budget movie is better than some that have the big budget. It creeped me out a bit. Starting hearing noises in the house and became antsy. Only reason for the 8, the ending confused me. Didn't understand how they came to the conclusion they came to or how they could translate what was being presented to them. Definitely watch. The movie was made by the entire family. The lightning and the filming were spot on. I do not know this family but they're did awesome. Definitely watch this movie!! Support these awesome people. DON'T read beyond here because it may be considered a spoiler.

I don't know if they said yes but I think they did since in the end they were inside the tree. Definitely watch it though. It's a family made film support this project!! Actually changing my rating to 9!!

One the of the most effective, interesting and downright creepy found footage horror films I've seen. The brother and sister (in real life) are actually great! It's odd to say this, but the film is actually really well shot! Some seriously legit visual scares, stylistic choices and lighting lends to a pretty intense 90-minute watch.

Kudos also for the director being a vinyl collector. A Prince cutout on the piano, Duke Ellington, Milt Jackson, Peggy Lee, Radiohead, Thrilling Sounds of the Haunted House vinyl (the front facing records change all the time in the film; that definitely means something), and an MF Doom (poster on the kids' BR door) are just aesthetically appealing to me as I have been collecting wax since 1982. A clear shot of Roy Ayers "Everybody Loves the Sunshine" was a nice "easter egg" to the story. Speaking of the story...it's interesting and I have some theories but still digesting.

All in all, what an absolutely pleasant surprise of a good film, especially for the Found Footage subgenre!

(minus 1 star for a 10 second shaky head scene that was completely unnecessary and took me out of the film at that moment...cause...shaky head ALWAYS takes me out of a film since Jacob's Ladder made it a thing that just won't go away)

This was a brilliant film made in the beginning of the outbreak of Covid with a lot of restrictions was a family made film directed by the brilliant Jacob Aaron Estes who you might know from directing award winning movie mean creek this movie was very creepy it follows Two happy-go-lucky siblings who are left alone while their parents recover from an illness play a series of pranks on each other. The game becomes nightmarish when they realize something sinister is watching them, and it wants to play too I have to say I really enjoyed this movie the way it was filmed was brilliant not many movies make me jump but this one did highly recommended.

There are three kinds of found footage fans; those who love found footage horror specifically ala The Blair Witch Project, Lake Mungo, What We Do in the Shadows, etc.; the kind who love the departure from traditional visual storytelling and thrive on the nuance offered by the narrative stylings of in-world-camera stories (definitely not exclusively horror fans). This group enjoys faux-docs, POV, and non-horror found footage (The Midnight Swim, David Holzman's Diary, Incident at Loch Ness, etc.) The final group enjoys both. This last group is primed to appreciate subtle found footage horror satire/commentary like Creep, Shadow of the Vampire, He's Watching.

He's Watching is a found footage horror film that allows us to see through the eyes of kids while they figure out life without their parents during a lockdown. At the same time He's Watching takes a look at the modern phenomenon of streaming indie horror and attempts to raise the stakes.

I personally found He's Watching to be a fun think-piece, especially when considering how anxiety can conjure existential horrors. The complete lack of narrative handholding allows for plenty of interpretation but clearly has turned off a large part of the first group of found footage fans I mentioned. If you count yourself among this group, please give the film a rewatch and think about moments like having to reassess personal objects for esoteric value. That's an incredible idea for a haunted house film, let alone an interesting project to carry out in our own lives.