Do you guys remember Oovoo? It was an easier-to-use version of Skype. It had text chat features, video chat features, and it was the perfect place for middle schoolers to interact with each other online in that period of time between the popularity of public chat rooms and the rise of facebook messenger.
Picture this: I’m eleven years old, alone in my room with my clunky, hand-me-down laptop that whines right when it’s turned on. The back of it is decorated with strips of Washi tape, and my desktop background is some dramatic quote about friendship set over a field of sunflowers.
I hear a familiar ringing sound, the chime that plays when you’re getting a call on Oovoo. I don’t answer, but the call connects anyway. Weirdly, I don’t see any video.
I hear a woman saying hi. Telling me that this is really cool and that her friend uses the app to talk to– The audio distorts. Her voice gets deep fried. Something crashes and someone screams. I slam my laptop closed immediately and go downstairs to cry to my father who is convinced I imagined the whole thing.
And you know what? I was, too. For years, I thought I’d invented it from a vivid dream.
Recently, I told my friend this story, and it only took two minutes of Googling for her to find this video, which is strikingly similar to my memory. I’ll warn you, while the graphics are meh, I still find it pretty freaky.
There’s this cyclical trend of using the internet to scare the bejeezus out of children. The Scary Maze Game, those “repost or this ghost will come out of your shower drain and kill you” posts, and the video this still is from:
I remember that old Youtube videos that were supposed to “hypnotize” you ended in jumpscares, and the rise of creepypasta that led to me being afraid to watch TV late at night lest I stumble onto a cursed television episode.
And now, as we enter an age where video chatting is nearly essential to maintaining a social life, horror movies have begun to catch on to this trend.
Do I think the Unfriended movies are high-brow cinema? No, of course not. I don’t think many horror movies in general fill that role, but I do think that the Unfriended movies are true to the spirit of the genre.
Horror movies tend to thrive off of being low budget bottle films. Think about the greats: Saw, The Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity. Together, their budgets don’t equal two million USD.
The rise in screen-capture movies fits perfectly within those parameters. It’s so cheap, you hardly even need to rent a sound stage. It’s inventive, it capitalizes off modern fears, and, let’s be honest, it cuts deep into the psyche of people who went through the same early 2000s internet bullshit I did.
After the release of Unfriended in 2014, there was a sudden “boom” of screen-capture films. I put “boom” in quotes because the quantity is relative. Unfriended was preceded by Megan is Missing (2011) and a few other horror movies, but Unfriended had an actual theatrical release, and brought on the rise in popularity of the genre. It also has a sequel, Unfriended: The Dark Web. Plus, outside of traditional horror, the genre also offers Searching (2018), which is a murder mystery where the clues all come from the data of the missing teenage girl’s laptop and phone.
I think this trend is fun. It’s low budget Black Mirror. It’s dramatic and restrictive, and it’s fun to see what directors can create with so little. Very rarely is the moral of the story that technology is bad. Usually, it comes down to the victim’s usage of technology. In Unfriended, the friend group are being haunted by the ghost of a girl they bullied into suicide. Megan is Missing is a gory, horrifying, dramatic take on internet safety. The Host on Shudder is strictly about taunting the dead.
If you’re looking for (often cheesy) horror that plays well into the restrictions of some of the best horror films, I recommend looking into screen capture movies. And if you’re like me and have a lot of pent-up distrust of the internet because of scary zombie women, I suggest leaving the lights on and keeping a blanket nearby. Happy watching!
