‘DARK WEB’ OF TERROR
‘Unfriended’ star Woodell enmeshed in Blumhouse horror productions
Horror has been key to rising star Colin Woodell's career. Just this year the green-eyed San Francisco native stirred the psychosis of troubled Claire Foy in Steven Soderbergh's “Unsane.” Come September, he confronts murder and mayhem in USA Network's new “The Purge” TV series as a married realtor facing a meltdown.
This Friday finds Woodell in a found footage psychodrama — “Unfriended: Dark Web” — as the leader of an online group that stumbles into hairraising real world terror.
“It's been a chipping-away progression for me,” said the 26-year-old USC arts grad of his career.
“As an actor, you learn to pay your dues and I'm very lucky to enter this Blumhouse realm” — producer Jason Blum's horror-centric universe is behind both “Unfriended” and the series.
“Unfriended,” which is told entirely through the online interaction of its characters, was actually filmed two years ago.
“The reason it took so long is that for a `found footage' film, each section is created step by step by our editor. Everything is predicated on postproduction.”
Woodell's character Matias is “a young guy in his 20s who's working on an app for his girlfriend, Amaya (Stephanie Nogueras). She can't hear and he wants to capture sign language and translate it immediately to English on your computer.
“But his computer has been going down and in a cybercafe he notices a laptop in the lost and found and decides to take it and open it.”
Once opened, something malevolently murderous and all-seeing appears. Matias and his buds freak.
“Yeah, it's a terrifying film,” Woodell acknowledged, “because it taps into this dark world, which I didn't know much about, called the dark web, which is way more real than I ever imagined.
“Everything that happens,” he added, “had to be based on something in the real world.”
Woodell calls making “Unfriended” “the most fascinating filmmaking experience I've ever had. Our location was this big house up in the valley in Los Angeles where every single room was an apartment. We were all in different rooms and could hear each other from the rooms.
“What was really unique, we rehearsed for five days and worked out the kinks with Stephen (Susco, the writer-director) and only then started filming. The way we filmed was like a play, these 15-minute-long takes. That's really unique.”