Unfriended (2014)

Dead Teenager Movie

Dead Teenager Movies are weird. They're a genre of fiction where unpleasant young characters are created so they can be killed in entertaining or affecting ways. It requires a weird kind of small empathetic leap to enjoy those stories. As someone who watches horror movies regularly my empathetic leaping muscles are pretty well toned. And that's probably why certain horror movies work more effectively on me when they ask the audience to confront their ability to make the leap. My go-to example is Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, which, as Bill Ryan says in his Letterboxd review, may be the saddest horror movie ever made. Part of the sadness comes from a fairly simple realization: the charming, interesting and occasionally spooky TV series I liked required this to happen so that I could watch and enjoy it. The movie asks the audience: this character was subjected to pain so that this story could happen, will you confront yourself with a discomfiting and draining depiction of that pain? It's pretty rare that a movie is willing to do that and I greatly appreciate it when I find it in other horror stories.

Unfriended does something similar, if much less intense, in its own found-footage-horror kind of way. The opening few minutes, where Blaire (Shelley Henning) watches a video of her friend Laura Barnes (Heather Sossaman) commit suicide, has a harsh and angry degree of verisimilitude. The shaky, grainy nature of the video, its lack of overt gore and the way Blaire clicks away from it before it finishes adds an uncomfortable weight of realism to the scene. The ones that follow turn away from this to indulge in a bunch of standard slasher tropes as we're introduced to our cast of expendable meat.

But even as the movie settles into a more traditional horror vein, the earlier verisimilitude lingers in the background (quite literally) as the gimmick. And it is a gimmick. There's no way "what if a slasher movie but on somebody's laptop" isn't a gimmick. But it is a very, very well realized one. The verisimilitude of that recreation is not only formally exciting but sells the early scenes of unease as common features of Facebook and Skype refuse to work the ways we know they do.    

After a point, however, the movie has to escalate and that's where the trouble begins. The death scenes simply don't play as goofy fun or tense and sickening. Instead they sit somewhat awkwardly in the middle. Though this would be a death-knell for most other slashers but here it serves to refocus attention on the emotional fallout of the spookiness, which is really where Unfriended seems to place its bets. The most common image in the movie is the Skype window with close-ups of each of the cast freaking out on their webcams. Even with the several layers of distancing granted by all the other horror movies I’ve seen before the concentration of this much emotional distress ends up working to the point where I came to empathize with the characters even if I didn’t come to care about them. This empathy had the knock-on effect of increasing the impact of each of the movie’s twists as they came down the pipe as I bought the emotional fallout of each of the revelations even if I rolled my eyes a bit at their extreme-ness. And that’s how a not-scary horror movie can hold you mesmerized for 82 minutes.

Also, something something I wonder if we enjoy horror movie karma for its extreme sense of overblown justice something something.