31 Shinbi's Apartment Ghosts!
DAY TWENTY EIGHT: EYE STEALER

Written by Jonathan Wojcik

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SEASON 04, EPISODE 2: in a brand new episode at the time of this writing, a boy with poor eyesight finds a discarded pair of glasses that improve his vision far beyond that of a normal person...but he increasingly experiences frightening, eye-centric hallucinations, especially the sight of other people missing their eyeballs.

When he finally realizes that the glasses are to blame, he suddenly finds that he can't take them off. A pair of ghostly, clawed hands manifest from the frames to clutch his head, and a weird, towering figure appears from the darkness to reconnect its arms to those hands, which is a pretty weird and creative sequence in itself. <

EYESTEALER is a tall, thin, pink skinned humanoid whose bulbous head, toothy smile, corpsey nose-hold and many big, bulging eyeballs immediately bring to mind some sort of space alien, especially the almost hi-tech looking glasses over his more human-like "main" pair of eyeballs. What does he want with other people's eyes, though?!

A lot, actually. Victims of Eyestealer don't just have their eyeballs taken, but are eventually brought to a dark, cavernous netherworld as its eyeless servants, while their actual eyeballs are added to a collection in a central chamber resembling the interior of one giant, veiny eye itself. I love how the collection is displayed, too; each pair of stolen eyes is kept in the same cursed glasses that entrapped their original owner, mounted in rows on stone pillars where they can blast intruders with laser vision. Stealing eyes is one of the grisliest things any of these ghosts have done, but Eyestealer goes about it like SUCH a nerd...which he is!

ORIGIN REVEAL:

Eyestealer was once a boy addicted to video games, until he was scolded by his mother for it and ran off. Feeling guilty, she went looking for him only to find him glued to app games on his phone, not paying attention to where he was going.

The boy bumped into a stranger and suddenly lost his glasses. Noticing his mother across the street, he scrambled to try and find his spectacles and meet up with her, but, perhaps you guessed it...he got hit by a car. It's a little less dignified of a death than others we've seen, and there's nobody we can really blame here either way, but it seems to have left him with a grudge against eyes in general, I guess.

There's a pretty sweet scene here, though, where the monster's glasses are knocked off in a battle and Hari actually puts them back on for him, which is the point at which he really calms down and apologizes.

And then, Hari adds Eyestealer to her own collection!

FINAL REVIEW:

Eyestealer doesn't have the most gripping tale to tell, and his motivation is a little lacking as well; unless I'm missing some vital context, isn't he kind of just being bratty about all this? Yeah, he died, but it wasn't through any great injustice or cruelty for him to be vengeful about. If anything he should be angry at cell phones. Maybe that's part of the fun of this one, though? He has such an over-the-top dastardliness to him and seems like he's getting such a kick out of it, you get the sense that maybe a part of this haunting is because he's still trapped in a "gaming" mindset. He's collecting people's eyeballs like so much gacha loot, playing the role of a sci-fi villain. This kid is just a big nerd and that much bigger of a nerd in death.

Then there's his various eyeball powers and his gorgeously outlandish design. The big, bloodshot eyeballs in his glasses are SO dorky you can't help but love him at first sight, while his corpse-like qualities and many additional, more frog-like eyeballs make the design genuinely creepy to boot.