“Don’t Peek” (2025) blends found footage, slasher menace, and supernatural dread into one of the year’s most unsettling indie horrors.
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Found footage horror is a genre that either collapses under its own limitations or transforms them into strengths. Kyle Tague’s Don’t Peek does the latter, cleverly folding its microbudget into the narrative while delivering a deeply unsettling mix of slasher menace and paranormal dread. It’s a film that crawls under your skin with its eerie imagery and sharp commentary on voyeurism, influencer culture, and the way technology distorts intimacy.
At first glance, Rebecca (Kelly Rook Daly) and Paris Winter (Jonathan Faircloth Kirk) seem like the perfect couple.
These two perky YouTube vloggers chronicle their daily lives for the channel Waking Up with The Winters. But the camera never lies for long. Tague peels back the façade through Rebecca’s subtle annoyance during “off-screen” gratitude exercises and her growing resistance to Paris’s obsession with documenting everything.
Their tension feels all too real, grounding the story before the horror creeps in.
The Winters’ luck changes when they discover a stash of dusty VHS tapes hidden in their new house. Desperate to revive their declining channel, Paris proposes uploading their reactions as they watch the tapes. What begins as unsettling voyeurism quickly spirals into terror.
The footage depicts a masked man—christened “Mr. Peek” (Robbie Allen, delivering a chillingly physical performance)—who stalks women in their sleep, rearranges objects in their homes, and films his predations with unnerving calm. One of his victims, known only as Scarlett, seems to bleed through the tapes, haunting both Mr. Peek and the Winters in increasingly surreal and terrifying ways.
Tague smartly embraces the duality of found footage: the grainy intimacy of VHS versus the curated performance of vlogging.
This contrast becomes a narrative engine, tying together themes of self-commodification and surveillance. In Tague’s words, “A VHS tape is something intensely personal, intended to be seen by a select few, whereas any footage captured by a digital camera is at risk of becoming grist for a content mill.”
The Winters’ obsession with clicks and views becomes their downfall, shattering Mr. Peek’s “closed loop” and unleashing horrors better left unseen.
The film’s structure and unnerving atmosphere recall The Poughkeepsie Tapes (high praise), but Don’t Peek adds a modern wrinkle: instead of uncovering hidden footage, we are shown what happens when that footage is exploited for content. The result is an unnerving meditation on complicity.
Watching the Winters laugh, recoil, and ultimately exploit trauma for attention implicates the audience as well, reminding us that horror voyeurism is a loop we all participate in.
Visually, the film makes the most of its limitations.
Shot largely on an iPhone 14 Pro, the various footage sources build an authentic and immersive aesthetic.
Clever use of rewind sequences reveals fleeting background figures (including the unforgettable Tape Face apparition, her satin nightgown, and red duct tape mask seared into memory), creating those blink-and-you-will-miss-it shocks that the best found footage excels at.
The climax, involving a final tape where Mr. Peek’s cycle unravels in grotesque fashion, is as bold as it is disturbing.
Like all great entries in the subgenre, Don’t Peek thrives on authenticity. Daly and Kirk strike the perfect balance between charismatic and insufferable, embodying the paradox of influencers we can’t stop watching even when we hate ourselves for it. Allen’s mostly silent Mr. Peek is unforgettable. He’s a presence so unnerving that even in stillness, he dominates the frame.
Don’t Peek isn’t flawless, but its blend of indie ingenuity, haunting imagery, and biting cultural commentary makes it one of the strongest found footage entries in years.
It’s an eerie, wildly effective nightmare about constant surveillance and the price of turning your life into content.
Overall Rating (Out of 5 Butterflies): 4
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