Vague Visages’ Unfriended essay contains spoilers. Levan Gabriadze’s 2014 movie on Shudder features Shelley Hennig, Moses Storm and Renee Olstead. Check out more VV film essays at the home page.

Internet horror is a remarkably tough subgenre to pull off. More often than not, filmmakers overcomplicate their premise to the extent that there’s no longer any justification for confining the action to a single computer screen or letting it unfold in real time. Back in 2015, though, Unfriended got it ruthlessly right, banking a massive $62.9 million worldwide against a minuscule $1 million budget. Georgian-Russian filmmaker Levan Gabriadze, working from a script by Nelson Greaves, placed six actors in a house for two weeks, stuck cameras in their faces and let the horror unfold. What emerged remains just as vital 10 years later, despite technology obviously evolving over that time.   

Unfriended’s closest comparison is undoubtedly The Blair Witch Project (1999). Aside from filming each actor head-on, typically in unflattering close-ups that put their confusion and terror front and center, the characters are fundamentally flawed and wholly unlikeable. Final Girl Blaire (Shelley Hennig) may be the worst of all, which is a refreshing twist on the trope — even more so when it’s spectacularly revealed that not only is she not a virgin but also slept with her boyfriend’s best friend. Blaire presents as sweet, kind and caring, constantly looking for reassurance from Mitch (Moses Storm) and trying to keep her friends in line.

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But Unfriended drops plenty of breadcrumbs about Blaire’s true nature, particularly in how she interacts with the Facebook profile of her deceased classmate, and former close friend, Laura Barns (Heather Sossaman). Clearly frustrated, she tries to shame the account for behaving badly, but Blaire isn’t really in a position to take the high road since she was instrumental in driving Laura to take her own life. The video central to her public humiliation is tame compared to the real-life examples of high school football players gang-raping intoxicated young women and proudly distributing the footage to their classmates, who escape punishment because they’re “good guys with futures.” Laura is shown drunkenly fighting, passing out and soiling her pants, but it’s the glee with which her rough night is recorded that makes it so cruel (note that the video’s title is “Laura Barns KILL URSELF”).

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When Blaire is confronted with horrible comments she and her friends left for Laura — using anonymous accounts, since they’re cowards on top of everything else — the Final Girl protests their innocence and, when that doesn’t work, she insists they didn’t mean it, that it was all a joke and, most importantly, everybody was doing it. Taken purely as a cheap thrills style horror movie, Unfriended is hugely effective. But as an unflinching denouncement of peer pressure and cyberbullying, it’s downright terrifying. This group of friends isn’t just forced to face their darkest secrets by the malevolent ghost of a former classmate, they’re forced to accept the fact that none of them are good people, even when it comes to how they treat each other.

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Early on in their nightmare Skype session (which lasts just under 90 minutes, meaning the events of the movie unfold in real time), Unfriended’s main characters take light-hearted shots at each other for being sluts, losers, stoners, whatever it is. When Val (Courtney Halverson), who’s clearly an outsider in their friend group, briefly joins the chat, it’s obvious that the jokes aren’t really meant to be in jest anymore. She’s the first to perish, albeit in the least horrific manner, with Blaire pointing out that Val used to suffer from seizures. Although they’re shocked, the central group moves on from her death pretty quickly. They’re all out for themselves, with Blaire gradually emerging as the most ruthless, considering she gets Adam (Will Peltz), her one-time lover, killed by revealing a message that explicitly warns her about what’s going to happen if she does so — pure of heart she is not.

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The Final Girl’s villain edit comes into sharper focus in Unfriended’s final moments when, backed into a corner by the Skype demon, Blaire throws her own boyfriend under the bus to save herself. Even worse, it doesn’t work because she is still being dishonest about her involvement in Laura’s suicide. A longer cut of the initial video that made her a pariah reveals that it was Blaire who gleefully captured and posted it in the first place and, once it’s shared on Facebook, her fate is sealed (the ghost still takes her out regardless). Unfriended is often unfairly lumped in with the likes of the similarly titled yet shockingly inept Friend Request (2016), but this nifty little shocker has much more on its mind than the admittedly goofy premise suggests.

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Convincing an audience to focus on a computer screen for the runtime of a feature-length film is no small feat, but Unfriended wisely uses the glitching effects to its advantage, usually to throw viewers off when the scares are coming. Modern horror has made it ridiculously easy to pinpoint frights, with music cues and pacing signposting them to an eye-rolling extent. There’s no score in Unfriended since the only music comes from whatever Blaire is listening to on Spotify (alongside the hugely evocative Skype jingle of course). Glitching is central to the movie, with the Universal logo appearing right off the bat, but these moments are erratic and unpredictable, which creates tension for the audience. The character clicks and scrolling are also realistically rendered, as is Blaire deciding what to type and then swiftly deleting it, which helps to fill in the blanks without any atmosphere-sapping exposition. In fact, much of the tension is built from Blaire hovering over a link before finally clicking on it.

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Unfriended sucks viewers in immediately, with no reprieve from the screen for its entirety. The movie was famously shot with everybody in one house together, sitting in different rooms, which creates a strong sense of claustrophobia (a camera system was rigged up to ensure the main cast could see each other and react in real time). Although audiences might just want the characters to close their computers and run away, it’s clear that something is lurking in the real world, waiting to pounce. Unfriended experiments with the social media format, so it doesn’t risk feeling flat but always obeys its own rules. The action was captured in long takes — and, on at least one occasion, in a single, continuous take — understandably making it a nightmare to edit. But the cuts are tough to catch, either because the action is so involving or because, again, relegating everything to a computer screen means the audience’s eyes are focused elsewhere.

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Aside from featuring well-known sites like Facebook and Skype, Blaire goes to Chat Roulette for help while Laura’s suicide video is hosted on LiveLeak, all of which lends Unfriended an uncomfortable sense of realism that cannot be achieved by using distractingly fake rip-off sites. It also means that the film doesn’t feel like a relic of a different time either, since most of these sites are either still around or immediately recognizable. It also reaffirms how easy it is to find messed-up content online once you know where to look for it. Unfriended is keenly observed, relentlessly cruel and frequently very frightening. The deaths are horrifying, especially poor Ken’s (Jacob Wysocki) viciously gory tussle with a blender, which is rendered in shocking bursts of violence as his helpless and screaming friends watch on. Clearly, Laura’s ghost isn’t playing around.

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Unfriended’s performances are similarly stripped back to match the film’s lean premise. Everybody is working from an impressively vanity-free position, since the camera angle isn’t exactly flattering, which allows the nuances of each take to come through. The characters are essentially all archetypes, but each actor finds interesting shades of grey to play with, so viewers don’t have to wait around impatiently for them to get picked off one by one (the biggest name on the call-sheet is arguably former child star Renee Olstead). Improvisation was encouraged, while the 12-hour shooting days understandably created a sense of exhaustion and hopelessness that really comes through onscreen. Unfriended’s main characters might be horrible people, but they’re entertaining company, and there’s an argument to be made that these six teens don’t deserve to die in horrific circumstances for their social media crimes.

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Unfriended is a canny and cautionary tale about the perils of treating the online world as though it has no consequences offline, engineering an oppressive atmosphere in which there’s no escape from your worst behavior. At WonderCon 2015, Greaves described Laura/the Skype demon as “everything scary about going online” because she sees what the characters do their utmost to hide. The sequel, Unfriended: Dark Web (2018), ups the ante considerably by widening its scope to include some of the biggest scum on the internet, making the central thesis even clearer. There are so few great examples of this subgenre done well, with The Den (2013)  and 2020’s Host (which owes a massive debt to Unfriended) immediately springing to mind. Unfriended is pure unadulterated tension, stripped down to its basest form, sustained and then gradually ratcheted up over 83 nail-biting minutes until it feels like you’re at the top of a rollercoaster about to plummet (and it ends with an all-timer jump scare). Facebook and Skype (R.I.P.) might have aged in the decade since Unfriended’s release, but this lean, mean, internet horror sadly feels even more relevant nowadays.

Joey Keogh (@JoeyLDG) is a writer from Dublin, Ireland with an unhealthy appetite for horror movies and Judge Judy. In stark contrast with every other Irish person ever, she’s straight edge. Hello to Jason Isaacs. Thank you for reading film criticism, movie reviews and film reviews at Vague Visages.

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