Interestingly, as someone who watched the second one first (and thus, was informed that there was ~ahem~ no way for there to be any carryover characters from the last film), I found myself watching Unfriended 2 with much more suspense. Each time the characters attempt a new way to outsmart the hacker—who makes the danger terrifyingly real with a physical and cyber presence—they felt tantalizingly close to outsmarting the bad guy. This was more than just running upstairs as opposed to running outside when escaping the masked killer, these were creative, problem-solving endeavors that I certainly wouldn’t have thought of. And, after all, that’s what makes for compelling horror (and, in particular, slasher) film fare: smart decisions that don’t pay off. As such, Unfriended 2: Dark Web left me on far closer to the edge of my seat than I would’ve thought for a film with such a low-hanging fruit of a name. 

So, of course I eventually turned my attention to Unfriended. Here I was, mid-way through the longest September, living through a pandemic and political tidal wave, and ravenous for one horror film after the next. I am sure that there are already personal essays out in the void that make the case for why me (and so many of my friends) crave horror films at this moment in time; something about Halloween just around the corner, and COVID on the other side of my mask. And after watching the two, I can say that this franchise feels much, much closer to home than so many do—even something like Host, another computer-based horror film. 

You might know about Host more by its logline: filmed post-March 2020, we follow a haunted Zoom call as the participants get “kicked off” one-by-one. It’s a tight hour, the length of their free Zoom call. But that’s the funny thing: real ones (all of us, by now) know your free Zoom call only lasts 45 minutes! A bit of movie magic we sacrifice for the plot, sure—but it would feel less nagging if the film was more plot driven. Mostly what you hear is what you get: the Zoom call is haunted because someone decided to fuck with the Zoom seance, and that’s about as much propelling the story as you’re going to get. It’s got jump scares, but that’s the entirety of your Host haunts. 

Compare that with something like Unfriended 2: A 20-something boy finds a laptop in the lost and found of his local internet cafe, thinks it’s his good fortune and takes it home just in time for his weekly game night with friends. As he starts logging in and loading up, he finds the previous owner of the computer left some things you might not want to check—like portals to the dark web, and all the evil therein. 

In Unfriended 2, the “dark web” works because it feels just as otherworldly as the undead. It’s the Upside Down, where our laws can’t touch, and we’re vulnerable just for turning around and checking on our loved ones. Step wrong and you’re doomed. 

Perhaps, at this moment, it felt so scary not because I’m going on the dark web at all (parents who read this, I cannot stress this enough: I do not, and neither should you!). But because...jesus what the fuck would we do if our computer was haunted at this point? Me, my friends, my loved ones—many of us have had to repair our laptops or swap out computers during this time, and never has our station felt quite so precarious as in those moments. Yes, that may be a dumb thing to say during a global pandemic! But I make my money via the internet, and without a portal—or using one that’s been contaminated in some way—I’d be screwed. And that’s all ignoring the friends I’ve been talking off the ledge, trying to counteract the brainworms they kicked up from reading the wrong kind of news. 

Unfriended 2: Dark Web (and Unfriended, for that matter) surpassed all my qualifications and expectations, surprisingly. It makes you care about the people enough that you can stake your standard thriller bets on who lives, who dies, who tells the story. It uses its in-screen device well, and has a sort of digital native understanding of the laptop. Things you don’t understand can be easily waved away with flattened, complicated expectations about world-building and evil. And at this moment in time, the killer has never felt quite so close to home. It’s somehow worse than the house being haunted—it’s your life out there, and there’s nothing you can do about it. 

Now though— as a full adult who loves horror films and has generally gotten a handle on her stress dreams—the time felt right to backfill this missing part of my horror canon. Unfortunately, it didn’t quite live up to the hype. 

It isn’t the movie’s fault. In the time since it debuted, grosser, more terrible movies have come into existence because that’s how technological advances and the onward march of time function. And I too got older and more able to handle an onscreen beheading or two. Watching the movie gave me the same bewildered feeling I got when I finally watched A Clockwork Orange in college. “This is what all the fuss was about?” I am nothing if not morbidly curious, and have always been drawn precisely to the things I suspect will upset me. (NBC’s Hannibal anyone?) I’m too nosy and my FOMO is too strong to not be part of the conversation. But as with A Clockwork Orange, values and standards have changed dramatically in the time between The Blair Witch Project’s release and when I finally saw it. Frankly, it’s got nothing on John Wick 3 (which I still have not gotten more than 15 minutes into despite really wanting to know what the deal is with Halle Berry and those dogs!)

As you likely already know, The Blair Witch Project is about a group of three student documentarians who travel to an old town to investigate an old ghost tale. When they trek into the forest and get lost, they slowly lose their sanity and each other before being killed by the town’s demons.

The problem is that The Blair Witch Project is simply too quaint for the sensibilities of someone who cut her teeth on slasher films and murderous ghost stories. And a big part of me regrets that! If I had seen this film closer to release, I have no doubt that I would remember it as a formative piece of terrifying media instead of simply an ambitious example of the possibilities of independent film. 

And the film is good, make no mistake. It’s moody and tense and the stakes increase exponentially in a way that I’m sure was legitimately upsetting at the time. But I’d been pre-warned that there were no jump scares and no actual Blair Witch looming between shots, so there was an added sense that I was building to nothing. (My most controversial opinion is that jump scares are good actually.)