The online killer continues to evolve
Internet terror feels more real than ever
Over the decades, the internet has served as a reliable bogeyman for Hollywood writers. And as the technology has evolved, so have our fears about what we can do with our computers — and what can be done to us. With Unfriended: Dark Web, the terror feels more real than ever.
In the 1980s, fear of nuclear catastrophe merged with hype about computers for flicks that promised the end of the world was just a mouse click away. WarGames (1983) and The Terminator (1984) posited the dangers of tying our nuclear arsenal to the whims of a computer (WOPR in WarGames; Skynet in The Terminator) operating outside the controls of its human creators. The internet was little more than a tool for nerds to share jokes about Star Trek, and we were already contemplating the ways in which it could destroy us.
In the ‘90s and early ‘00s, the internet became a mechanism for shadowy entities to wipe away our identities and steal fortunes. The Net and Hackers, both out in 1995, suggested the scariest thing about the internet was the way computer files could be changed to erase our existence — from the DMV, IRS, you name it.
The hacker in Hackers only used the threat of imprisonment of our protagonists as a means to a more common end, of course: He wanted to make a ton of money. But what had been played for laughs in the previous decade (Matthew Broderick hacks into his high school mainframe in two different films, WarGames and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off ), now felt deadly serious.
In the new millennium, FearDotCom (2002) was an early, disastrous effort at making the internet a terrifying place: Visitors to a website (three guesses at the address) found themselves dead 48 hours later after experiencing creepy hallucinations. Turns out the site was created by a (apparently technologically advanced) ghost that sought revenge on the world for having been murdered years before by a serial killer who allowed people to watch her killing.
Make no mistake: FearDotCom is terrible, the 50thworst movie of all time according to IMDB users. Much better was Pulse, the 2001 film out of Japan. Nominally focused on spirits trying to invade the physical world by way of our Wi-Fi, Pulse was actually about the ways in which the internet atomizes society and the depression this isolation engenders.
The two Unfriended movies seem to have the best understanding of how the internet actually works and how people actually use it, and are scarier as a result. Both flicks unfold in real time, with the movie screen portraying the actions on a laptop’s desktop.
Unfriended (2014) focused on cyberbullying. Six friends of Laura Barns (Heather Sossaman), a high schooler who committed suicide after a video uploaded to YouTube turned her into a pariah, start to receive spooky messages from someone with access to Barns’ previously defunct social media accounts. Soon after, they begin committing suicide one by one until Barns’s betrayer reveals herself.
Far more terrifying is stand-alone sequel Unfriended: Dark Web, which posits a world where anonymous trolls can get away with literal murder and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. The evolution of the internet as a villain — from a place where your identity might be stolen to one in which strangers might murder you for lulz — mirrors the very real way the internet has evolved for many of us.