We all have our guilty pleasure shows and it’s almost always reality TV. There’s something about watching people we don’t know go through their daily tribulations to win prizes or, more often than not, notoriety, that draws us into their worlds. Even if it’s happening in our own city, the act of seeing it on the screen makes it so much more engaging than experiencing it in the moment as the person being filmed. But then the cameras in these shows always hold their contestants at arm’s length, acting as observers more than anything. Blink, by Christopher Sebela, Hayden Sherman, Nick Filardi, and Frank Cvetkovic, brings the camera much, much closer.

Wren doesn’t remember her past—not all of it. There are flashes of things she remembers: being a small child, being found in New York, being covered in someone’s blood. And the briefest pieces of something else. The exact nature of those flashes is still out of her reach, but she’s been researching for decades to find those piece. Even after moving to Arizona and starting a life and dealing with the sleep paralysis demon that visits her nearly ever night, she still is looking for the missing pieces of who she was. And she finds it. A website that she can only glimpse for a moment, but she recognizes it. The dozens of camera set up, recording everything happening in some kind of facility. She knows that this is where she’s from and will ruin her life to finally have the answers to the questions of her own life.

Unfortunately, Wren finds her answers and it’s here Blink becomes something more. Where Wren was born is a facility set up during the dot com bubble by a millionaire who wanted to create art by recording people’s lives. But then he just never let them out. Those locked within became tribal, started to change and mutate themselves to follow the millionaire’s will while others donned masks to hide their faces from the camera. And then the fighting that led Wren’s parents to push their newly born child out of a window in the compound’s basement sealed the building for good. No one in or out for twenty years. The people left inside began to curdle—their minds left them as they worshiped the deity of observation called Blink. But it wasn’t a delusion as when Wren returns, she acts as the catalyst for the summoning of this new god. Where we would expect deranged mythologizing from people who haven’t seen the sun in decades becomes frighteningly real and it’s that twist—along with the distended arms of Blink reaching through reality—that lingers long after the story ends.

Blink builds off of our expectations of locked-room tribalism in the most horrifying way possible. If the act of observing is all it takes to bring something horrifying into the world, what happens to everything we watch already? Is Blink already here? Maybe it’s been staring at us all along. 

Get excited. Get watched.

Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.