Eyes in the Dark is a 2010 found footage horror film. It is written and directed by Bjorn Anderson.
Seven college students decide to spend their last weekend together at a ski lodge in the Cascade Mountains. As they film themselves for their video blog, they record some strange occurrences. The students and the lodge's caretaker come across a mysterious cave with unusual markings and they soon become hunted by an unknown force with glowing red eyes.
This film provides examples of the following tropes:
- Animalistic Abomination: Glimpses of the monsters reveal them to be bear/wolf things that started hunting the protagonists after coming across a cave with strange markings in the wilderness. The Native American tribes in the area also have had contact with the things, so they have been around possibly a very long time.
- Apocalyptic Log
- Developing Doomed Characters
- Downer Ending: All the college students along with the caretaker never made it through the night.
- Found Footage Films
- Foregone Conclusion: Earlier in the film, a news report was focus on the "missing" students. Midway through the movie, the scene shifts to a search and rescue party trying to locate the students from the night of the attack.
- Ghost Story: Told by the caretaker regarding an Indian legend relating to the creatures and the number of human disappearances that occurred before the current setting of the film.
- Glowing Eyes of Doom: The aforementioned "eyes in the dark."
- Invisible Monsters / Nothing Is Scarier: Though the creatures are unseen at night and only characterized by their nocturnal glowing eyes and eerie howling, they are only partly visible in some scenes and are somewhat resembles to a cross between bears and wolves.
- Meaningful Name: "Eyes in the Dark" is a FBI designation for the recovered films. Also for the creatures according to the translations of the Indian hieroglyphs ("beware the eyes in the dark").
- Never Found the Body: No bodies were even found that the search party were looking for the victims, in spite of the obvious signs of violence.
- Red Eyes, Take Warning: The creatures have this as their most prominent feature, considering the rest of their body is hidden from view.
