Unfriended looked hilarious, I was laughing so hard in its trailer and it simply didn’t look scary. I couldn’t wrap my head around the idea of a horror film taking place entirely within a computer screen, plus I thought the title for the film was terrible. It looked like an MTV produced horror film that appealed to 12 year olds and was a simple cash grab. It wasn’t until I found out that the film was an independently produced festival flick that I began to gain some hope for it, but it didn’t excuse its trailer from being so awful. I opened my mind going into my screening for the film, holding onto the hope of an effective indie film with an R rating and tried to enjoy myself with this digital version of The Blair Witch Project.

Unfriended revolves around a Skype call of friends who are caught in a supernatural haunting over the computer on the anniversary of a bullied student’s suicide. The said student was humiliated over a YouTube video of herself drunk online and the resulting bullying led her to take her own life, which a video of said suicide also surfaced online. The accounts of this student’s Facebook, Skype and E-mail are now terrorizing the social medias of her living classmates.

I’m not going to lie, Unfriended scared me. Unfriended scared me a lot. The usage of the computer screen as the setting was very effective and provided a lot of subtle character development for our main character of Blaire. While I found the supporting characters to be some standard archetypes of the typical high school film, but the performances in the film were nuanced and nicely frenetic to match the scary situations happening on screen. I thought that, especially for such a short film, had much more character development than any teen horror film in a long time.

Like I said before, the usage of the computer screen as its setting provided more atmosphere than a typically shot horror film. It’s hard to call this film “found footage,” because it doesn’t adhere to the typical handheld camera devices that the more cliché’d horror films use religiously. The subtle usages of broken sound and images in the Skype call to create the illusion of a bad internet connection made the scares all the more effective, as it hit closer to home with dealing with the awful on-campus wi-fi whilst trying to Skype, its like this film was made to hit the hearts of UNCC students.

I can’t write much more about Unfriended without giving it away and the less you know about this film going into it, the more effective and all the much more scary in its experience. Unfriended obviously will strike a chord with the younger audience rather than older viewers, something I saw with the reactions in my screening tonight, with the polarization of opinions. Obviously, Unfriended is here to scare younger audiences and does that quite well. Not only that, it provides pure entertainment through its effective and nicely innovative approach to filmmaking. In the world of four Transformers films, seven Fast & Furious films, and five Paranormal Activity films, original filmmaking, especially original horror filmmaking, is not something to be taken lightly. Throw in a distinct tone of dread, genuine tension and some shocking scenes of violence, and you’re not going to want to hang up on Unfriended.

4/5

Photo courtesy of Universal Pictures

Directed by: Levan Gabriadze
Starring: Shelley Hennig, Moses Jacob Storm, Will Peltz, Renee Oldstead, Jacob Wysocki, Courtney Halverson and Heather Sossaman.
Runtime: 82 minutes
Rating: R for violent content, pervasive language, some sexuality, and drug and alcohol use – all involving teens.

Universal Pictures and Blumhouse present, a Bazelevs production, Unfriended