Found footage horror arrives at Rutgers University this month with the New Jersey premiere of Don’t Look in the Dark, the directorial debut from genre producer Sam Freeman. The film will screen on January 31, 2026, as part of the New Jersey Film Festival, hosted on the Rutgers campus in New Brunswick.
Don’t Look in the Dark follows a couple whose phones begin recording on their own during a camping trip, capturing fragmented audio and video as night falls. What starts as unexplained footage gradually becomes the center of the film’s tension, drawing both the characters and the audience into a destabilized experience of observation and perception.
The film previously screened at the Birmingham Horror Film Festival & Convention, where Freeman received the Best Feature award. Ahead of the New Jersey screening, Freeman described the project as an effort to rethink how found footage functions in a theatrical setting, emphasizing that each screening can reveal different details depending on the environment and the audience’s attention.
The January 31 screening will take place at Rutgers University, offering local audiences an opportunity to experience the film in a festival setting. Set largely within the Pinelands National Reserve, the story centers on grief, impending parenthood, and the uneasy idea that being watched may carry consequences of its own.
