Colby D. Johnson
The technological revolution of the past half-century has had a greater impact than we have yet to comprehend. The effects are becoming more and more apparent as time passes, especially when it comes to our coping with the trauma of events like 9/11. Such events have created a universal sense of paranoia and distrust of the powers that be, of those who are supposed to protect and serve. These rising tensions are spurred on by the veritable onslaught of traumatic events that have occurred over the past two decades. As is often the case, art reflects life and vice versa. While we can see examples of these rising tensions throughout the culture of the past two decades, horror film is of particular interest in that it subconsciously reflects our deepest fears. With the 2010s came a new subgenre of horror, one that focuses on what Shoshana Zuboff has termed “surveillance capitalism” within social media. This subgenre is “cyber horror,” or more specifically “media horror,” of which there are two forms: 1) social media is used as a plot device via traditional formal elements of filmmaking, and 2) the social media plot device is dramatized through footage shot via the same technologies (computers, cell phones, virtual reality, etc.) that have made social media platforms so powerful and pervasive. This second form is what Russian producer Timur Bekmambetov has termed “screenlife” (Daniel 150). Yet, what many have failed to realize is that not all screenlife films treat their narratives similarly. In the same way that horror contains many subgenres, screenlife too is multiple. This piece focuses on the neo-slasher and explains a specific kind of screenlife film, films like The Den (2014) and Unfriended: Dark Web (2018) that set themselves apart as examples of what I call the “cyber-slasher.”
The cyber-slasher
What makes the screenlife films of the cyber-slasher different from those of other media horror? In other words, what sets Unfriended: Dark Web and The Den apart from other films that use the screenlife format? Why focus on the sequel to the Unfriended franchise and not the film that Bekmambetov was producing when he coined this term? To put it simply, I argue that what makes Unfriended: Dark Web and The Den cyber-slashers is what lies beyond the main computer screen. Beyond this screenlife format, there is a living person or persons orchestrating the events of the film in a way that mimics traditional slasher tropes. It is not a scorned spirit, as in Unfriended (2014) and Host (2020), and the films are not strictly thrillers in the way that Searching (2018) and Profile (2018) are. Rather, they are films in which an outside person orchestrates the abduction and/or killing of a group of individuals via that social media/technology on which they believe themselves to be safe.
Cyber-slashers are made all the more intense through their format as screenlife films. This format lends itself to familiarity via voyeurism. In the same way the killer is watching, so are we as the viewers of said film, even if we do not know the details of the conspiracy unfolding before our eyes. Likewise, the paranoia of being watched in our daily lives is exploited in a way that effectively reinvents the genre. Technology, feelings of paranoia, and the form of the slasher work together, then, to produce a successful subgenre. Because if neo-slashers as a whole have been posed with any challenges, they are the challenges of adapting to new technologies. By embracing technology through genre conventions like screenlife, the genre can then exploit the paranoia that inevitably follows the inclusion of technology. Thus, we can see through cyber-slashers that paranoia is key to that success.
The challenge of evolving technology for the horror film
As we have undoubtedly seen in the past two decades, with technological progress comes change. In the 21st century, the neo-slasher’s most pressing question has been how to anticipate cell phones and other portable technology. These innovations present far more issues than household phones or even the internet ever did simply because these technologies have characteristically come to the aid of victims in slasher films. An interesting example can be found in something like Scream (1996), in which Sidney Prescott uses her desktop computer to contact the police in the heat of an attack. The use of that technology saves her in that situation, and while Sidney is the final girl in the Scream franchise – meaning that we know she will somehow survive her killer – the inclusion of such technology hinders the story progression if it shifts the balance of power overly much toward the potential victims. We might claim, moreover, that a goal of the slasher film is to render technology useless, but with more and more innovations, the genre is then faced with an overwhelming list of technological solutions that ultimately hinder the flow of the film. It doesn’t help that with the passage of time, technology has become progressively more portable. Every year it seems like we are bombarded with thinner and lighter technology, always with this thought in the back of our mind that it is easier to take with us, to provide us with convenience, but also with protection.
In the 21st century we are obsessed with being safe, being protected from danger—no matter how one perceives the threat or the problematic nature of the fear. Women refuse to walk alone without another person or some type of weapon for fear they will be raped or abducted; countless individuals purchase guns on the basis that they want to protect themselves or their family from some mystery attacker; a white person crosses the road when they see a person of color walking down the street; and in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and its vaccination efforts, individuals refuse to receive said vaccine because they hypothesize there is some type of computer chip in it so the government to track them.[i] This paranoia is a part of our lives at this point, and the cell phone is one of the prime contenders when it comes to how we protect ourselves, especially in the context of a horror film. Someone is stalking you or giving you the creeps? Text a friend. Call the police. Protection is right at your fingertips, and the horror genre must adapt and respond to that phenomenon.
Many films, especially those of the 2000s, would simply restrict their characters by a lack of cellular service. In a world without ample amounts of wifi connectivity and without the devices to access it, this solution was an acceptable one. At a certain point, however, technology and access evolved, and the genre was once again faced with the predicament of adapting to new technology. So, what is a horror film to do? It exploits the paranoia increasingly attached to technology, and specifically social media, thus producing what the introduction defines as screenlife and its product, the cyber-slasher.
Paranoia and the cyber-slasher
The cyber-slasher is one form of the neo-slasher, a term this special issue defines as those reinvented slasher films of the 21st-century. These films ultimately adapt the stringent rules of the 1970s, 80s, and 90s slasher, but the cyber-slasher in particular focuses on the element of stalking—preying upon both the general paranoia produced by the past two decades as well as all those more particular times we have felt unprotected online. This goes back to Zuboff’s term “surveillance capitalism,” which refers to the lack of laws constraining social media corporations in the late 2000s, which allows them to collect information from their users, often without consent (Naughton). These actions are something to which Unfriended: Dark Web directly alludes, with online conspiracy theorist AJ (Connor Del Rio) questioning, and then claiming with everyone following along as if they have heard it far too often from him, “Why do you think Facebook and Twitter are free? Because you’re the product.” It is important to note, however, that the paranoia surrounding corporations is not the prime focus of these films. Instead, that focus is something much darker.
While AJ is protecting his accounts so he cannot be tracked and The Den’s main character Elizabeth Benson (Melanie Papalia) is attempting (and failing) to find the location of the girl whom she saw murdered live on the video chatting site that gave the film its name, the killers are lurking in the recesses of their computers. They are lying in wait, watching and ultimately getting ever closer to the moment when they can abduct and kill their victims for the pleasure of those that have paid to watch it all unfold.
The Den
In many ways, these killers resemble the online social media corporations, taking information without consent and chronicling moments that they can use —in this case to embarrass their victims or somehow ruin their lives in the future. We see this stylized act of collection play out in both films. In The Den, Elizabeth’s intimate moments with her boyfriend are recorded and then sent to her grant committee, resulting in a frantic call from her advisor that causes the project to be put on hold. Unfriended: Dark Web uses this collection tactic a bit differently in their targeting of AJ. They, i.e. the powers that be called “The Circle” that orchestrate the killings in the film, use excerpts from his YouTube channel, “The Way of AJ,” in which he discusses conspiracy theories, to call 911 and make a threat of gun violence, which ultimately leads to his shooting by the SWAT team that soon shows up at his home. The killers in both films use the collection of information differently, and yet this process is crucial to the heteronomy of the main characters of each film in this space – despite how the controlling nature of the technology might initially frame the film.
Ultimately, what this literally systematic (in that it takes place over a computer system) control leads to in these films is the sense that we have no power over anything we do online. The sense of false autonomy is blown out of proportion in these films, but the paranoia that this false sense creates does its job effectively. What we are left with in the wake of these films is a feeling that we are powerless, and we are being watched.
Unfriended: Dark Web
Both films end with scenes that reveal all, specifically that the film we were just viewing is a product that others can access and watch for a small fee. Such surveillance capitalism is exactly what John Naughton claims it is in reality: “The combination of state surveillance and its capitalist counterpart means that digital technology is separating the citizens in all societies into two groups: the watchers (invisible, unknown and unaccountable) and the watched” (Naughton). The killers in these films are invisible, unknown, and ultimately unaccountable, and the films portray them as masked figures in order to heighten this monstrous quality, something Carol Clover saw in horror film more generally when they explained, “The horror movie is somehow more than the sum of its monsters; it is itself monstrous” (168). At the same time, the audience would seem to be a victim peeking behind the curtain, the final scenes of these films suggest that perhaps we too are what makes cyber-slasher monstrous.
We as the viewers of the film are watching these events unfold as if we too were part of the online groups paying to see these films via the dark recesses of the internet. The perhaps more troubling aspect of this interchange is that, as viewers, we more than likely paid to see these horrible things happen to people as well, whether that be via a streaming service or a theater ticket. This ultimately leads to questions about us as an audience. Have we gone too far with horror? Is there a bleeding between reality and fantasy? And are we made uncomfortable by the realistic qualities of these screenlife films? This element of these films lends itself to activism, especially in a time when internet-based sex slavery, kidnapping, and pedophilia is thriving, and not nearly enough awareness is being brought to it. Ultimately, what these films show, or at least impress upon their audiences, is the possibility that reality is just as (if not more) horrifying than what we see on the fictional screen. It is something that sticks with us, which is a sign of true horror cinema according to Japanese filmmaker Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who writes:
On the other side of the fence stands the darkened figure of a human being. When you look carefully, it looks like a friend who has died. You gasp in surprise. In the next instant, the figure disappears. So, how do you overcome this fear? To put it bluntly, there is no way of escaping this fear as long as you live. Your life will undergo a great change from that moment on. Even if the trouble goes away – and in fact no trouble may occur at all – the shadow of the dead will cling to you even if you flee to the farthest reaches of the universe.
To Kurosawa, cyber-slasher films are, then, the “fear that follows one throughout one’s life.” After all, if the cyber-slasher is anything, it is the fear and paranoia that stalks its audience like a killer.
Notes
[i] For a more detailed description of how this misinformation surrounding microchips in vaccines developed see Ike Sriskandarajah’s 2021 article, “Where Did the Microchip Vaccine Conspiracy Theory Come from Anyway?” from The Verge; James Heather’s 2021 article about the impracticality of this theory, “Putting Microchips in Vaccines Is a Terrible Idea, When You Think About It” in The Atlantic; and the debunking of the theory on the Australian Government’s Department of Health FAQ page, which, at the time of this publication, was last updated on August 25th, 2021.
Works Cited
Clover, Carol J. “The Eye of Horror.” Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, Princeton University Press, 1993.
Daniel, Adam. “The Evolving Screen Forms of New Media Horror.” Affective Intensities and Evolving Horror Forms, Edinburgh University Press, 2020.
Kurosawa, Kiyoshi. Eiga wa osoroshii [Film is Scary]. Translated by Kendall Heitzman, Seidosha, 2001, pp. 23-26.
Naughton, John. “The goal is to automate us’: welcome to the age of surveillance capitalism.” The Guardian, 20 January 2019.
The Den. Directed by Zachary Donohue, IFC Midnight, 2014.
Unfriended: Dark Web. Directed by Stephen Susco, Universal Pictures, 2018.
Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. PublicAffairs, 2019.
