Happy All-Hallow’s Month! In anticipation of Halloween — which, let’s face it, we’ve been anticipating since last Halloween — Daily Grindhouse will again be offering daily celebrations of horror movies here on our site. This October’s theme is horror sequels — the good, the bad, the really bad, and the unfairly unappreciated. We’re calling it SCREAMQUELS!
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I’m a pretty anxious person. One of the things that fills me with the most anxiety is the internet, and yet, for some reason, I spend most of my day engaging with it in one way or another. I’m hardly alone in this sentiment, doomscrolling through Twitter until I fall asleep for the night and immediately picking up the phone again as soon as I open my eyes. The internet is pervasive, full of some of the worst information you can find and the darkest corners imaginable, making it rife with horror. One film series that investigates this profound fear is UNFRIENDED. The first UNFRIENDED movie, often dismissed but deeply loved by me, scratches the surface of internet based horror by combining it with the supernatural. In addition to ghosts and murder, a lot of the moments of terror in that film come from technology malfunctioning. While on a Skype call, the group of friends see an unknown person join the video chat and are unable to remove them, which in turn freaks the audience out because we are so well versed in the way things like that are supposed to work that this is instantly eerie and unnatural.
The sequel to UNFRIENDED, UNFRIENDED: DARK WEB takes this to the next level by eliminating the supernatural elements and creating a horror fueled purely by the internet. With an entirely different cast and premise, it seems to have little to do with the original beyond the screenlife film format pioneered by UNFRIENDED. Still, this movie could not have existed without the original proving that this format could work and be profitable. It paved the way for this sequel as well as later screenlife movies like PROFILE and SEARCHING. Watching these movies on a laptop is an incredibly immersive, anxiety inducing experience, and I often found myself trying to click on or dismiss notifications that the characters were receiving, thinking they were my own. While that experience from the original UNFRIENDED certainly translates over to UNFRIENDED: DARK WEB, it creates a different kind of terror because it is all based in reality and real life circumstances.
That’s exactly where UNFRIENDED: DARK WEB becomes more terrifying than the original for me because I can tell myself ghosts and demons aren’t real, but I would have a much harder time convincing myself that the dark web isn’t real. We are introduced to the dark web in this film when our main character Matias (Colin Woodell) brings home a laptop he saw in a coffee shop lost and found. You know, like stealing. He is swiftly punished for this theft however, as we discover that this laptop belongs to a member of a highly sophisticated cybercriminal ring, The Circle, and this person is not happy about Matias having access to his private information. Private information like bitcoin transactions in exchange for video footage of women being kidnapped and tortured. While I am not aware of the full ins and outs of the dark web, I would guess that the depiction of it in this movie is not 100% accurate, but it still operates within the realm of possibilities which can be incredibly frightening.
Some of the scariest moments in UNFRIENDED: DARK WEB involve the concept of deepfakes which are essentially edited images, video, or audio that convincingly make it appear as though someone is saying or doing something that they never said or done. One character, AJ (Connor Del Rio) meets his demise as a result of manipulated videos, a somewhat primitive version of a deepfake. AJ hosts a YouTube channel where he discusses various conspiracy theories and makes a lot of my points about the evils of the internet and social media for me. Members of The Circle have stitched together various phrases that AJ has said on his channel to make it appear as if he’s saying he is going to shoot up a shopping mall and play that message for a 911 operator, causing police officers to swarm his home. The hackers play audio of a shotgun loading over AJ’s speakers and the cops immediately burst in and shoot him dead. Again, this is something I can feasibly see happening to someone, which just makes me want to go entirely off the grid and throw my phone into the ocean, so you could say it’s an effective moment for me.
The internet is scary enough all on its own without necessitating any monsters. The anxiety of it is palpable through notification sounds that increase in frequency, mysterious hard drives that are entirely full of hidden files, relatively simple, potentially innocuous things that would have been meaningless a handful of years ago, but in this present moment give me a pit in my stomach that is only replicated by the actual experience of engaging with the internet in real time. The circumstances in UNFRIENDED: DARK WEB are certainly more elevated than my day to day internet browsing, but the implication of very real danger lurking just below the surface is always there. This comes to a head in the film when it is revealed (SPOILER ALERT) that the laptop was planted for Matias to find so that The Circle could implicate Matias and his friends in the abduction and torment of the women in the videos saved to the hard drive. The final nail in the coffin of this plan comes when the hackers deepfake Matias’ face onto the body of one of their own sneaking into a young woman’s bedroom, pinning her kidnapping on him. Perhaps the execution of this deepfake looks more like a poor photoshop job, but once again, it’s something that I can see happening. We’ve seen celebrities deepfaked into revenge porn, politicians deepfaked into making declarations that they’ve never said, and the horrifying dangers of this media form are fully on display here.
After all of Matias’ friends and his girlfriend are killed by members of The Circle, a poll is launched asking if Matias should live or die. We are shown that all the members of The Circle are voting on this poll as they have been watching the events of the movie play out as a part of their own perverse game night. The psychological torture and ultimate murder of these people served as their entertainment, and now they get to have a hand in the final outcome, like a choose your own adventure book. Obviously, they choose to kill Matias, presumably succeed in pinning their crimes on him and his friends, and celebrate the conclusion of their evening. While incredibly heightened in intensity, this idea of passively consuming other people’s real lives, and in turn suffering, is not foreign to most people in their day to day interactions with the internet. From daily vloggers on YouTube to fashion influencers on Instagram, these people are famous for being people and sharing their lives with an audience of strangers.
Our interactions with the internet are so ingrained in our daily lives that it can feel strange to take a step back and examine them. In fact, the day that I am writing this, there has been a massive outage of Facebook and all its affiliated apps and some people are ceasing to function. It is truly overwhelming to think about the vast impact that this one website on the internet has had in the real world. For many, Facebook and its services are an annoyance, for others it operates as a necessity, and for some, it can be both at the same time. Whichever way you may lean, the internet has permanently shifted our reality. This new way of life comes along with new fears, fears that movies like UNFRIENDED: DARK WEB expertly prey upon to hit us right where it may hurt the most and strike us with an incredibly tangible fear.
Tags: Andrew Lees, Andrew Wesman, Betty Gabriel, Blumhouse, Chelsea Alden, Colin Woodell, Connor Del Rio, Douglas Tait, Horror, Jason Blum, Kevin Stewart, Rebecca Rittenhouse, Savira Windyan, Sequels, Stephanie Nogueras, Stephen Susco, Timur Bekmambetov
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