Unfriended Trailer: Because You Really Wanted a Found-Footage Movie Based on Skyping
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I have always been an advocate for horror movies metaphorically dealing with real-life fears, be it nuclear war (Dreamscape) or dating (May). So cyber-bullying to the point of suicide, which is a very modern and very real thing that frightens, is as rife for horror-mining as anything else.
But I’m also an advocate for not watching crappy, blocky, filmed-on-Skype conversations in a movie theater to which I paid full ticket price. If some enterprising kids made this movie for nothing on their laptops, bless ’em – it’s the perfect movie to watch online. But when I hear that Timur Bekmambetov, director of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, is the guy who developed and conceived this, then got it sold to Universal, I must assume either…
(a) It is so fucking brilliant that we viewers will be able to see past the utterly rotten-looking “cinematography,” or…
(b) Universal thinks teenagers are morons who will pay for anything that they call “horror” and can associate with a “visionary filmmaker” (who is known purely for adapting other people’s creations).
Also, trailer-makers: Who says “posted to the Internet” any more?
About The Author
Luke Y. Thompson has been writing professionally about movies and pop-culture since 1999, and has also been an actor in some extremely cheap culty and horror movies you will probably never hear much about (he is nonetheless mostly proud of them, as he met his wife on one). As editor of The Robot's Voice since 2012, he can take the blame for the majority of the site's content, all of which he creates because he loves you very, very much. (Although he loves nachos more. Sorry.) Prior to TRV, Luke wrote for publications that include the New Times LA, Los Angeles CityBeat, E! Online, OC Weekly, Geekweek, GeekChicDaily, The L.A. Times, The Village Voice, LA Weekly, and Nerdist