2025 October Horror Challenge #22 "They Look Like People"

nothing will top the first time that I saw this movie. And I know that because it's just one of those experiences you're never going to be able to replicate. I was sitting here doing my Halloween Horror challenge trying to watch a hundred horror movies for the month of October one year and there's a movie called they look like people and I'm like okay well let's see what they really look like so I click on it and watch it. let me tell you how much this movie messed with my mind. I have seen so many horror movies I have seen 100 horror movies every October and throughout the year horror movies for every year my 44 years on earth cannot exactly that many every year of my 44 years but you get the idea I've seen lots of horror movies and so they don't always get to me the way they would get to people who are normal because I am not normal. This movie got to me. And it's a lot of just a guy lying in bed quietly staring at the person next to him in the darkness with no music waiting for something to happen waiting for their face to change waiting for something horrific to jump out at you not sure what's going to happen next and it just builds the sense of tension that is unspeakable. I can't even describe how tense I was I was biting my nails I was covering my mouth with my hands at the end of the movie, I was watching the movie with my hands covering my eyes partially and sheer terror and I watched the end credits that way too because I didn't trust that the movie wasn't going to come back at me and show me something else horrifying so I had to watch it until the end credits were over with and that is pretty special because I don't just watch the end credits for anyone. sometimes I think that to truly understand mental illness, you have to be mentally ill yourself. maybe that's not true, but to really understand what it's like to have to fight battles every single day with your own mind that's telling you things that you know aren't true and showing you things that you know aren't real and you have to stand for what's right and what's true and what's real in spite of what your mind is telling you and showing you? That's hard to do. And I don't honestly think that I've ever seen a movie really portray what that's like for me before I saw this movie. The main character in this movie is just a regular guy who has a fiance and he has a best friend and things start happening to him and he starts seeing things and hearing things and are they real We don't know and most of the movie isn't really much happening it's just scenes from these guys friendship them talking them hanging out them playing games then talking about life while they play basketball. I'm sure some people who watch this movie after I tell them how much it scared me think that I'm a big wuss because they think the movie isn't scary because there's no chainsaw wielding maniac jumping out of the woods at people those can be kind of scary too you know? I would be scared of somebody jumped out of the woods at me with a chainsaw. But there's a different type of fear and the fear of your own mind and what it can do is a fear that maybe some differentn't know and some people don't understand. There's a lot of stigma surrounding mental illness because people don't understand it because people whose brains work properly Just think well that's not real Just tell yourself it's not real Why doesn't that work? if that worked then we wouldn't be mentally ill in the first place yay you've cured us! That's like talking to somebody who has asthma and saying why don't you just breathe There's air all around What's wrong with you. The point is you can't breathe it's great that there's air You can't breathe it it's not doing you any good. In this movie, everything in this guy's head is telling him that there are monsters and they're taking over the world and that the people around him aren't really the people he knows and loves but their monsters and he needs to destroy them. That's terrifying don't you think? I mean for me it's terrifying It would scare the shit out of me i know, so i really feel for this guy in his quiet struggle against his own mind and the battles he fights every day that no one else can see. And the thing about mental illness is that it's insidious because it is inside your head so no one can see it, so no one really knows what you struggle with on a daily basis and no one can see that this guy is falling apart because everything is happening inside his head and he doesn't know if that's true or not if he can trust his own mind, and he doesn't know if everyone around him is suddenly turning into a demon and he needs to be the hero to kill the bad guys and save everything or if he's really messed up and something's really wrong with him. And it's not like he's not doing anything about it he's seeing a psychiatrist he's taking meds he's going to therapy He's telling a psychiatrist about his visions and about his dreams and his psychiatrist seems like kind of a douche who blows him off and that's unhelpful but he is trying He's struggling as hard as he can against a monster that no one else can see. So your life can be completely falling apart and you can be shattered into a million pieces and no one will know because the damage is all inside you where no one can see it right? So with this movie this guy is slowly very slowly losing everything that he loves and the people in his life don't totally understand what's going on or appreciate the significance of it until things get weirder and weirder and until he starts showing more and more signs of his mental illness outwardly because people can't see what happens on the inside so they have to look at outward actions and his outward actions seem normal until they don't. that's the struggle. I guess I just connect because the actors do such a great job I feel for the guy who has mental illness I feel for his friends who are just his friends who don't know what to do He's just a little strange and unusual until he actually becomes dangerous and by the time he becomes dangerous you have a choice to make I guess. Do you turn him into the authorities what do you do when it's someone you love is struggling with this kind of mental illness? And the thing is you get a lot of people who don't understand mental illness so they treat people with mental illness like absolute feces coded garbage. it's sad. With my meds I'm probably more stable than some of you but you wouldn't know that unless you knew me and knew you very well, and were able to tell the difference. So people use mental illness as an excuse to treat people like garbage basically they hospitalize and institutionalize people who don't need to be institutionalized they don't believe anything we have to say because we're mentally ill which is extremely annoying to me because I have a college degree and I'm getting my master's degree I'm not stupid and I know what I'm talking about and people refuse to listen to me on subjects that I know a lot about because they know that I have a mental illness which is just ridiculous to me. it's the same as not listening to someone who has diabetes because they have to inject insulin to control their illness. I can't help the way I am, and I'm a good person most of the time at least I like to think so. And I think that the guy in this movie is a good person and he likes to think that he's a good person and he doesn't know what to do. He's just living a nightmare. And movies like "Smile 2" are definitely more outward with the gore effects whereas movies like "they look like people" are small and quiet and they don't have all the special effects They just have a guy looking into the camera and you have to see that he's watching his life fall apart through his facial expressions and that's hard to do and they managed to make me care about these characters so I was very impressed with how well this movie did what it did on such a small budget. Plus it helps that I'm going through some of the things that these characters are going through, like losing jobs and having relationships break up and many of the other stressors that are happening in their lives that is exacerbate the situation and make everything 10 times worse when you're dealing with either a demon invasion or mental illness lying to you, and you don't know which is which. But watching the characters fight this evil which is really just fighting with your own mind is encouraging to me and it actually moved me to tears at the end of this movie though I was terrified that something horrible was going to happen and didn't trust the filmmakers not to throw something else at me so I watched the movie through my fingers covering my eyes because I was so scared and felt for the characters and that is something special not many movies can do that and this movie did that for me So I will always highly recommend this movie to people even though it might make you question whether I'm really a horror fan or not if I consider this horrific but understand that different people find different things scary for different reasons. I can watch somebody get sod in half and their skin ripped off and their head chopped off and be fine with that and then a movie like this stops me in my tracks and makes me cry So you just never know It depends on the individual viewer but for my money this is one of the best movies you could watch for any horror challenge and I will always love it for that.