A new kind of horror film seems to have come to the fore within the last few years: online spooky demon webcam footage films. TQR previously reviewed Host, which is not dissimilar to this, and it would be very surprising if there aren’t more movies just like it in the future.
Unfriended follows a group of friends on a live Skype webcam session. (Skype? This 2014 movie is already showing its age.) After some niceties and formalities, the group begin to receive messages from a former classmate who committed suicide one year ago to the day. As anyone would, the friends start out thinking that someone is simply pranking them. However, the girl then begins to reveal some of their deepest, darkest secrets and they begin to suspect that this is no hoax, becoming more and more terrified that someone is trying to kill them.
Okay, let’s talk about pacing. Unfriended takes way too long to get going. There’s no two ways about it. Of course they need to set up the situation and give us a little bit of info about each character, but this is borderline tedious for the first 30 minutes. At least.
What you have to give it credit for is the way it attempts to modernise the horror genre, as already alluded to above. Clearly taking its documentary style footage from The Blair Witch Project, it brings everything to the 21st century for a young audience… Except the Skype thing. Who uses Skype anymore?
On that note, I have to insist that Host (2020) is better. This feels too much like a bunch of whiny arsehole teenagers having an argument rather than making it genuinely scary. There’s an attempt to vilify cyber bullying too, which an important lesson, but not what I want from a horror movie. Does anyone? And even then it doesn’t go far enough, so it all just falls a little flat.
Is it weird that some of this is funny? The character of Laura has the most banter, and her choices of music are absolutely hilarious. It’s probable that these things were included to provide some levity in an attempt to really take you off guard later on down the line, but again, it’s not very scary when it comes down to it so such an effort is wasted here.
In short, one should really appreciate the ingenuity of the film, but on the whole it is bang average horror fodder with some minor glimmers of talent amongst the cast.
Unfriended is available to stream on Netflix in the UK.
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