BONUS: In Search of the Eyeless Man: A Texas Teen Story by Brea Grant

October 26, 2020·48 min·4 clips

Brea Grant opens Melody's secret dossier expecting dirt on everyone in their friend group — and finds every page covered with one line: 'The eyeless man has his ways.'

1. A Texas Teen Story is a bonus episode of Video Palace, a Shudder original horror podcast, featuring a personal contribution written by actress and director Brea Grant, read by Rebecca Ross. 2. Grant is known for acting in Friday Night Lights, Dexter, and Heroes (where she played Daphne), as well as writing and directing 12-Hour Shift and Lucky, and the story is described by host Sam Zimmerman as a firsthand account of unexplained events from the 1990s. 3. The episode's central question is whether the choices made in formative years can invite forces that haunt a person for the rest of their life, and Grant's story is offered as evidence that they can. 4. Grant grew up in East Texas in a small town approximately ten years behind the broader cultural curve; she formed her identity around alternative music — punk, goth, hardcore — as a means of distinguishing herself from the football and cheerleader social hierarchy. 5. The friend group's de facto leader was a girl named Melody, characterized by jet-black dyed hair, perfect wingtipped eyeliner, the ability to skateboard, and a private notebook she called her secret dossier, in which she claimed to document everything significant about the group. 6. The secret dossier functioned as Melody's primary tool of social control: she would smile a strange smile, observe something — a new haircut, a comment — and write a note no one was allowed to see, implying the capacity to destroy anyone in the group. 7. Grant was excluded from a sleepover at Melody's house after refusing to participate in skipping class and smoking cigarettes, two refusals she attributes to being a rule follower who needed good grades to escape her small town. 8. At the sleepover, the girls found an unidentified channel on rabbit-ears TV playing low-quality music videos of bands none of them could identify — some shot on camcorders, some appearing to be film recordings — all performing songs referencing a figure called the Eyeless Man, something called the stack, and something called the transfer. 9. The band names, when any of the girls tried to recall them, came out as unpronounceable consonant-vowel combinations; the girls collectively felt a sense that 'you didn't say the bands' names because it felt bad.' 10. All of the girls grew bored of the channel over the course of the night except Melody, who remained fixed in front of the TV until morning, an absorption Grant describes as the beginning of Melody's transformation from charismatic leader to absent, boring obsessive. 11. Grant attempted to ingratiate herself with Melody by expressing interest in the bands; Melody's only communicable memory was a single lyric: 'The eyeless man has his ways,' which Grant copied onto her notebooks as a gesture of solidarity. 12. As Melody became increasingly absent-minded and disinterested in her social role, Grant used accumulated resentment to methodically displace her — planting doubts about Melody's appearance, borrowing influence by being generous with her own records, and orchestrating her own slumber party that excluded Melody. 13. Melody stopped appearing at school; the town organized search parties, put up posters, and canceled school — but not football games — while most adults concluded she had either run away with an older man or died by suicide. 14. Grant and the friend group privately believed Melody had left to find the source of the channel or the bands, but without band names or any identifiable details, they had nothing to tell the police. 15. Walking home from school, Grant saw a glow from an abandoned shack the friend group sometimes used, entered, and found Melody staring at static on the rabbit-ears TV from her house — red-rimmed eyes, unwashed, posture that suggested she was beyond hearing. 16. Rather than calling for help, Grant took the secret dossier from beside Melody and left; she describes this decision as driven by a combination of self-preservation, residual resentment, and the belief that Melody was already gone. 17. When Grant finally opened the secret dossier, she found not documentation of the friend group's secrets but every single page covered with one repeating line: 'The eyeless man has his ways' — with band stickers on the cover dated years before the slumber party where Melody first saw the channel. 18. Years later, alone in a Kansas City hotel room and binging YouTube, Grant saw a video she believed featured Melody — same eyeliner, same hair, singing the words 'the eyeless man has his ways' — and spiraled into the same obsessive pattern: canceled flights, refused to leave the hotel, stopped eating, did not sleep. 19. Grant describes discovering the Video Palace podcast as the thing that gave her obsession structure and connected it to the broader investigation of the Eyeless Man, but says it did not end her obsession — it confirmed it. 20. The story ends with Grant acknowledging that the Eyeless Man used Melody's addiction against her and may be using Grant's guilt and need for power in the same way: 'At the end of all this, Melody kind of won.'

As heard by us

A Texas teen story turns obsession, cliques, and power into a tense Eyeless Man entry.

Bria Grant's story follows a teenage rabbit hole of secret videos, half-remembered lyrics, and social jockeying, and it lands as a tight look at how obsession spreads inside a clique.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

A personal teen-horror story about obsession, cliques, power, music, and a mystery that never fully clears.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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