In a sun-scorched backyard in Redding, California, a teenage boy crouches low, arms coiled, eyes tracing the arc of an invisible opponent. There’s no coach, no camera, just the rhythm of his own body and the faint hum of cicadas. That boy is Eric Jacobus. Basketball failed him, baseball bored him, and the “man stuff” everyone else seemed to do never fit. But movement—its logic, its poetry, its capacity to reveal the self—called to him.
“I realized early that how someone moves tells you more about them than words ever could,” Jacobus says now, decades later, in a studio that smells of rubber mats and electronics, walls lined with marker-less motion-capture suits and hardware. “That idea became my compass.”
By 18, Jacobus had built a digital dojo: an online community called The Stunt Forum where fans of Hong Kong action cinema gathered to study every flicker of a fist, every twist of a body, every rhythm of a fight. “Hollywood influenced us,” he says. “But the precision, the flow of Hong Kong films—that hypnotized me.” (Worth noting, The Stunt People Forum recently reopened on Discord.)
It was more than fascination. It was a blueprint.
From Backyards to Breakthroughs
In the early 2000s, Jacobus’ obsession left the screen and moved into real life. “Having moved his stunt team, The Stunt People, to The Bay Area, he began shooting short films in abandoned warehouses, cracked parking lots, and his own backyard.” No budget, no permits, just a few friends, a camera, and a shared belief that action could be art. These films—raw, inventive, sometimes dangerous—circulated quietly, eventually earning cult status among martial arts enthusiasts.
Then came Contour (2006), later re-cut as The Agent. Written, directed, and led by Jacobus, it was the rare independent action film where every punch carried weight, every fall had consequence, and humor coexisted with philosophy. Critics called it a masterpiece of underground cinema. “I wanted fights to be meaningful,” Jacobus says. “Not just spectacle, but expression.”
His next experiment, Rope-a-Dope (2013), pushed boundaries further. A short film built around a Groundhog Day-style time loop, it combined bone-crunching choreography with comedic timing, flipping martial arts tropes inside out. Its sequel went viral, drawing praise from genre legends and cementing Jacobus’ reputation as someone who could lampoon and elevate action simultaneously.
By 2018, studios took notice. SuperAlloy Interactive, the mocap and action design studio he co-founded, became a quiet powerhouse. God of War, Mortal Kombat—if you are a player of these games, you’ve played as Jacobus himself, even if you’ve never seen him on the big screen.
Anthropology, Comedy, and Human Violence
Ask Jacobus what drives him, and he doesn’t talk about fame or adrenaline. He talks anthropology. Violence, for him, is a lens into human behavior: how we fall, fight, resist, and navigate danger.
Early in his career, Jacobus began noticing a troubling trend: violence was being equated with animalism. “Scientists kept bringing violence back to animals, but I was trying to bring it to the human,” he says. “Human combat looks nothing like animal combat. When I see violence in the real world, I do not shirk away. I do not say, ‘This is what we are, chimpanzees.’ I say, ‘This is so uniquely human. It is about us. We cannot relegate it to the unspeakable.’ Violence is not a gene or a hormone. That line is easy to hold. People do want to talk about violence.”
Jacobus’ main nerve is action comedy. “I take a lot of inspiration from vaudeville. Not all comedy is the same. “It’s like these characters, Chaplin, the Stooges, are embodying the Biblical scapegoats, but they turned the self into the scapegoat.” Instead of teaching the audience to scapegoat the other, they get the audience to look at themselves. I flocked to that. And I combined that with action. Jackie Chan is a big influence on me,” he says. “That’s naturally where I go. I am an outsider, or have felt like one my whole life. And I want to hold up a mirror to make the audience realize they’re laughing at themselves. That goes beyond catharsis and becomes a conversion experience.” He is reflective about the moral implications of his work. “You have no way to know whether your work will hinder or incite violence. Some people may see you as a catalyst for danger, and others may feel it. I do not claim to be someone who is stopping violence. I want to understand the implications of what we are doing. I am a contractor right now—I’m getting paid to make violent video games. For myself, I have to ask, ‘What impact is this going to have on my kids?’ That is the important work. I want to create a language to understand it.”
Limbic vs. Cognitive Martial Arts
Jacobus distinguishes between two very different styles of martial arts.
“There’s the limbic style,” he explains. “You need to respond in a moment’s notice, without thinking. Seconds can be death. These schools operate on a harshness mentality. The teacher may yell. It’s stressful—a simulation of a violent environment, meant to train you to act without thought. I’ve sparred with martial artists from this background. Sometimes the simulation became reality for them.”
The other form is cognitive. “This is about strategy, reflection, and de-escalation. You talk about avoidance instead of engagement. A stunt performer who is very limbic could go off in a choreographed sequence. That can be dangerous—they may hit an actor or lose control. The sweet spot is cognitive. You run simulations that look real, but you’re not relying on instinct or trauma. You’re building a vocabulary of movement so that when a moment comes up, you do not make a knee-jerk reaction.”
Jacobus’ personal experience reinforces this philosophy. “I was robbed at gunpoint once. The guy put a gun in my chest and took all of our camera equipment. I ran through every disarm I knew—and all of them would have gotten me shot. A great screen fighter can straddle, block, or counter, but real life doesn’t give you that luxury.”
Much of his research draws from police body cam footage. Success, he explains, is when an officer can pacify a perpetrator without firing. “That’s extremely difficult. De-escalation tactics are trending because they work. That’s the kind of approach I want in stunt choreography—truthful intensity without unnecessary harm.”
Scapegoating, Culture, and Violence
Jacobus’ fascination with human behavior extends beyond movement. René Girard’s theory of scapegoating informs his worldview.
“Scapegoating is baked into all human institutions. We have this need for someone to take the fall. There’s a sort of biblical message—the innocent victim dying for the collective. But there’s no truth in that. If you become deluded into thinking one person’s downfall is cathartic for everyone, where does that come from?”
Jacobus approaches this deliberately. “When we watch celebrities take huge falls in the name of a movement, it’s a collective lie. That person could have been me, or my daughter. Rachel Ziegler did exactly what she was told and gets scorched for it. It’s built into the human operative system.”
In his work, Jacobus often embodies the “faulty” character. “I play the person who’s flawed, not the idea. I might get ganged up on, but I overcome, not by turning the gun on my opponent, but by subverting it. It’s not revenge. It’s about converting retribution into a higher form of culture. I am anti-revenge.”
He contrasts human and animal combat. “There’s scapegoating in animals, but it’s different. Animals don’t use objects the way humans do; combat is optimized, it creates hierarchies and serves evolutionary goals. Humans are imaginative and symbolic. We can escalate, we can diffuse, we can turn violence into ritual, blame, or culture. That’s what makes it meaningful.”
Violence Across Time
Jacobus imagines showing his films to a tribe untouched by modern civilization. “What would they get right, and what would they misunderstand about us?”
“They would understand immediately that violence is a human problem to be managed, choreographed, and ritualized, not an animal instinct. There’s this myth from the 19th century. Anthropologists saw things that disturbed them and drew false analogies to animals—cannibalism, raiding, human sacrifice. Huge fallacy. “Those rituals were murderous and evil, but at their core they were misdirected attempts to defer or contain violence. In some ways, those societies were more honest about scapegoating than we are.”
Jacobus emphasizes the adaptability of human conflict. “Introduce a new weapon into a society and tactics change immediately. Look at the Aborigines in Queensland: the mounted police taught them to shoot rifles, and they integrated it skillfully. Japan adopted firearms in the 16th century and transformed its tactics. Violence is not about a genetic predisposition, it’s about learning, culture, and context.”
“If a Paleolithic person watched one of my movies,” he says, “they might not understand the technology or mechanics, but they would understand the meaning. They would see that violence is undesirable, that it is something to be managed, rehearsed, and given consequence. That’s the human part. The rest—swords, guns, stunts—is just language, just tools. And that language can be explained across any culture.”
Mad Science in Daily Life
Outside of stunts or filmmaking, Jacobus treats his daily life as a laboratory. “My mad science is a combined neuroscience and linguistics project,” he explains. “When I’m doing motion capture, I’m constantly analyzing movement. Certain instinctual styles may be useful, but they need to be reshaped. I’m always converting these motions into a vocabulary, searching for a grammar. I want a punch you’d never see in a boxing fight but that looks incredible on a character.”
He applies the same rigor to himself. “Learning movement is punishing, like trying to learn Japanese at 18. You’re off the path of what you’re trained to do. I want to know how much fluidity there is. Everyone has recursive loops in the brain that can be trained. “Neurodiversity, for instance, shows that different brains, whether autistic, schizoaffective, or otherwise, aren’t necessarily less intelligent. They just interface differently. But everyone can learn a new language, a new movement style, if approached methodically.”
Jacobus seeks collaborators who challenge his assumptions. “I’m always looking for people who are trying to do the same thing, push beyond instinct, create something extraordinary. That’s where innovation happens.”
Risk, Courage, and Moral Philosophy
Jacobus is often asked why he risks his body for art. “A lot of stunt guys admire the military. We do the next most courageous thing. We put our bodies in danger, but it’s calculated. Everything I do is engineered to the nth degree. In that sense, I’m not courageous at all. Johnny Knoxville is more courageous than me.” His moral courage, he says, lies elsewhere. “I was bullied growing up. I never fought back. I learned to transfer that energy into art. That’s moral courage—choosing not to perpetuate violence, choosing to turn the other cheek. Since 9/11, calls for retribution have only grown louder. Even teaching restraint is treated as betrayal. Nonparticipation in the culture of revenge disrupts the algorithm. That’s the work. That’s courage.”
Beyond the Spectacle
Finally, Jacobus considers the enduring essence of his work. “If all my films disappeared tomorrow, I’d hope people still understood one thing: stop looking at yourselves as animals. We are so different. Lazy social Darwinism says evolution gears us toward aggression or maximizing reproductive success. That’s meaningless. Humans create tools, families, religions— “not just to survive the environment, but, more importantly, to survive each other.” Jacobus adds, “Our crises are human-made, not environmental. Violence is not inevitable. Life is for nonviolence, for beauty, for love, for each other. Love your neighbor as yourself.”
He gestures broadly. “Look at the Irish elk. There is a case of its antlers growing so large it couldn’t makes its way through the forest, it couldn’t survive. Humans are ‘unoptimized.’ “Unlike the Irish elk which died because they couldn’t defer combat, we can use anything in combat, escalate endlessly.” But we’ve channeled that energy into culture, art, and technology. That’s how we’ve spread across the Earth—and, one day, beyond it. That is the human story.”
In Jacobus’ world, stunts, martial arts, and motion capture are more than entertainment. They are a lens on humanity: a way to see ourselves honestly, confront our impulses, and transform raw violence into meaning, insight, and beauty.
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Photo credit: iStock
