I kind of made my way backwards to 2014's "screenlife" horror movie Unfriended, featuring films in this countdown that have used the same format to tell their horror stories years after Unfriended did. (For the record those previous films were Death of a Vlogger, Host, and We're All Going to the World's Fair.)
I'm actually happy that I, for whatever reason, never bothered to see this when it originally came out because now, over 10 year later, the movie has an added bonus of nostalgia. Nostalgia for the days when teenagers were still actually using Facebook and its clunky, blocky site design; for how photo attachments took almost a minute to download; for pixelated Skype video calls; for the sound a computer hard drive would make when it was processing.
I think distance from 2014 tech also helps in overlooking whether the movie actually gets it right, since I don't really remember what that tech was like. (Also, I've never made a Skype call in my life, so no idea if that's how it really worked.) Like similar films that followed, Unfriended plays out on a computer screen, with us seeing what the main character Blaire (Shelley Hennig) is seeing as she messages and Skypes with her friends. It's the anniversary of a classmate's death who was driven to it by online bullying, and when a stranger enters their Skype call claiming to be that dead classmate, things get spooooooky.
Frankly, I wanted things to get a little spookier. There are two scenes that use the tech well, taking advantage of common computer glitches and making them spooky. But there's not enough of that, and towards the middle, when it's just these kids screaming at each other, I got a bit bored. Cut 15 minutes out of this, and you'd have a really tight little horror flick.
As it's not currently streaming free anywhere, and my library only has the sequel (reserving that now, ha), I rented Unfriended on Apple TV.
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