I know who you Skyped last summer: how Hollywood plays on our darkest digital fears

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/apr/23/unfriended-hollywood-darkest-digital-fears

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‘Whatever you do, don’t fall asleep,” cautioned the tagline for A Nightmare on Elm Street back in 1984. Thirty years on, having your dreams interrupted by some old codger with a pair of scissors is the least of your worries. These days, you can’t even open your laptop.

More than any other genre, horror acts as a barometer on exterior fears. The bogeymen of our times are stumbling ciphers for outside concerns. In the 50s, Invasion of the Body Snatchers fretted about McCarthyism. In the 80s, The Thing riffed horrifically on the emerging Aids epidemic (watch that blood-test scene again). And post-9/11, the torture-porn subgenre, spearheaded by Saw and Hostel, placed viewers in the position of prisoners, held below ground, off-radar, subjected to dreadful indignities.

Last weekend saw the emergence of a new cycle of horror into the mainstream. Unfriended opened in the US with $16m at the box office (making it the third-biggest film in the charts). On the surface, its plot seems hopelessly generic. A girl is driven to suicide and her vengeful ghost haunts the teens responsible. So far, so similar to every other sleepover shocker. But the twist here is that the entire film unfolds on the main character’s computer screen. Conversations happen on webcam, exposition via Facebook messenger and plot points are revealed on YouTube. It’s “I know who you Skyped last summer”, made to make you go omg wtaf.

Nelson Greaves, who wrote the script, says that’s simply how our lexicon of emotions now operates. “Each of us spends five, six, seven hours in front of the computer every day. It has got to the point that a movie about life on a computer isn’t gimmicky, it’s a movie about the thing we spend the majority of our waking hours doing.” And while Unfriended might not reach the giddy fright heights it aims for (there’s a bit too much minimising and maximising windows to fully terrify), it’s a smartly constructed set of tricks. It also treats the obnoxious kids at its core with such distaste that an older audience may find it surprisingly satisfying. The web is used as an invasive weapon against a cast of technologically reliant teens whose grimiest secrets are hidden online.

In 2014, a report by internet security firm McAfee found that the number of cyber-bullied 11- to 17-year-olds appeared to have doubled year on year. Says Greaves: “The scariest thing is that no one seems to know what to do about it.” It’s this which gives pop schlock such as Unfriended an uncomfortable edge – at least among its core audience.

Related: Unfriended review - I know who you Skyped last summer but iDon't care

The success of the film in the US can be partly traced back to a marketing campaign that reached out to the same audience as the movie’s victims. A fake Facebook account was opened for Laura Barns, the girl at the centre of the haunting, the videos that propel the plot were made available on YouTube and LiveLeak and the trailer, launched in conjunction with MTV, notched up more than 14m views. The focused targeting meant that 74% of the opening weekend audience was under 25.

Yet while the trailer might rumble that it’s “a new genre of horror”, this is, of course, a format that has been used before – just in less effectively marketed films. Last year saw the release of two other laptop interface frighteners. In The Den, a stalker used a Chatroulette-style app to hunt his prey, while the DePalma-ish Open Windows saw fansite webmaster Elijah Wood blackmailed by a psychopath to kidnap a star. Buzz is building for Ratter, filmed from the viewpoint of a hacker who takes control of a young woman’s phone and laptop (“bracingly effective”, says the Hollywood Reporter). Web-based horror movies are officially trending.

Branden Kramer, Ratter’s director, attributes this new slew of movies to a creeping sense of helplessness. “We may be at a tipping point, where people are realising the power of the internet and how much we rely on it versus what we don’t know about it. There’s a vulnerability that we can all relate to. A fear of the unknown. Most of us have an intimate relationship with the internet and our phones and yet we have a serious lack of understanding about how it all works or how they’re secured.”

Psychology professor Travis Langley thinks the instinct to track our own lives through a Facebook timeline and then see that transferred to the big screen is natural enough – it’s just that the results unsettle. “Web life is both unreal because of how it’s disconnected from the life we live outside the computer screen and weirdly real for the many ways in which genuine human interactions take place,” he says. “This paradoxical unreal reality is a rich playground for horror.”

Hollywood’s relationship with social media has been one of big hits and bigger disconnect. While David Fincher’s Facebook origins story The Social Network won big, there have been bad missteps, from Hideo Nakata’s Chatroom (online conversations were clumsily brought to life) to Jason Reitman’s Men, Women and Children (which played out like a public service bulletin about the dangers of even thinking about Wi-Fi). The logistics haven’t helped: watching someone tap at a keyboard simply isn’t compelling. In the 2007 cyber-sex thriller Perfect Stranger, Halle Berry’s online flirtation with Bruce Willis was brought to life by having Berry repeat every typed line of bantz out loud, to notably unerotic effect.

The new class of digi-dreadfuls has overcome this problem and kept things cheap. Thanks to the deliberately low-quality, often glitchy video chats, Unfriended cost just $1m to make. But while its 16-fold return on opening weekend is impressive, such on-the-button use of software means long-term prospects are less healthy. The film’s seamless integration of Spotify and Skype might seem snazzy in 2015, but fast-forward a decade and any movie that isn’t a classic will surely just look dusty.

It was ever so, of course – Hollywood has long struggled with capturing the zeitgeist. The awe of watching Sandra Bullock order pizza on her computer in 1995’s technophobic chiller The Net was as fleeting as the thrill of watching Jonny Lee Miller and Angelina Jolie try to protect an important floppy disk in the same year’s Hackers. It’s not just online magic that’s tough to capture on the big screen. Ever see the mid-80s John Travolta/Jamie Lee Curtis aerobics drama Perfect? Are you looking forward to this year’s parkour thriller Tracers with Taylor Lautner? Shelf-life is always short when you’re trying to crest a wave.

“I think that as more and more of our lives move online,” says Greaves, “film-makers are going to be faced with a choice. To make something that exists for ever or make something of the time that is true at the moment it’s made. We don’t ride in wagons any more but that doesn’t mean I can’t watch a film where people are riding wagons and not understand what that means and how that feels.”

But it’s not just the expiry date on films such as Unfriended that could concern future film-makers. Though its takings impressed, reaction was mixed. Despite some decent reviews, it measured a disappointing C- on CinemaScore, which measures exit opinions in the US. It was also polarising on Twitter (“Warning : #Unfriended is cringeworthy and just keep in mind, who the hell uses Skype any more?” “Just watched a whole movie via Skype, so that was incredibly frustrating.”) Using open forums as a promotional tool can be a double-edged sword.

But Hollywood isn’t clicking the unfriend button just yet. Rebel Wilson and Amanda Seyfried are attached to a forthcoming romantic comedy called The Social Life which sees a woman vet her friends’ dates via social media but after she finds the perfect guy, she uses his online profiles to turn herself into his dream woman. Darren Aronofsky is also set to produce a thriller called XOXO, tipped as a Facebook spin on Fatal Attraction. Oh and Unfriended 2: #blocked might be a thing as well. “We’d love to do a sequel,” Greaves says. “We’re all still waiting a bit to see how things shake out exactly but I think there are definitely more stories in this universe to do.”

Yet many remain sceptical that this is a standalone universe at all. When defending Men, Women and Children, Reitman was eager to suggest all online activity was just a mirror, the internet merely “a location”.

Mathias Clasen, a Danish academic specialising in horror fiction, suspects the trend will delete itself in time. “Underneath the superficial variation, horror shows a remarkably stable structure over time,” he said. “Horror is designed to freak out its audience, and because of our biological construction, there’s only a limited number of ways of effectively freaking out people. That’s why even an apparently super-modern film like Unfriended has to resort to a thousand-year-old horror monster – the malevolent, dangerous ghost – to freak out its audience.”

Bad news for budding film-makers seeking to turn procrastinated hours into box-office gold. But at least Freddy Krueger can scrap plans for that insomnia app