'Unfriended' up close
Let's talk about the defining horror movie of the 2010s
You are a junior in high school, and your eight closest friends stand before you.
Imagine someone, let’s say God or even the principal, telling you that you need to rank them, and assign each of them a number. One is the highest and eight is, well, you know…
They carry this number around for everyone to see. Everyone, that is, who didn’t have a number of their own. Your #1 is probably your girlfriend or boyfriend, if you have one. Numbers two and three, then, are your closest friends, but how do you decide who goes where?
Now imagine that each of the people before you also have to rank their eight closest friends. That means you're probably getting assigned a number too, unless you are embarassingly left out.
I’m sure what I’ve just said is instantly familiar to someone who had a MySpace account. One of the 2000s social media platform’s most note-worthy and casually sadistic features is what I just described: Curating your “Top 8” friends.
MySpace dominated my high school years in the mid to late 2000s but quickly fizzled away by the time I was in college. The concept of the “Top 8” feature lingers, though.
It added a whole new dimension to high school social hierarchies. It was one more thing to hurt someone with, or be hurt by.
Facebook didn’t ask people to do this, but it had its own humbling features. It allowed you to tell the world, or at least the dozens of people you added as friends, who you were dating.
Did you ever know someone who changed their Facebook relationship status from “In a Relationship” to “It’s Complicated?” Your profile even showed your network who you were being complicated with. Humiliating.
There was another vital feature on Facebook, one that every user has been on both sides of at one point or another. When you no longer want to remain connected to someone- for reasons personal, political, or because they are simply dull as hell- you can remove them from your friend list.
And thus the term ‘unfriended’ was born.
This stuff seems so mundane when you’re on the outside looking in, or 15 years removed from it looking back. Reliving the urgency of early social media usage brings up a frightening thought: People didn’t always know so much about each other.
I have to remind myself of this every time someone, let’s say a promising, chiseled young actor, logs onto Twitter and favorites a bunch of BDSM content not knowing that the posts he was liking were displayed on his profile for the world to see.1 (Twitter recently made users’ ‘Likes’ private, so only you and the original posters will know what perversions you’re engaging with).
These indignities are commonplace online; you don’t have to be a famous actor to attract a horde of ridicule.
This kind of brain-rotting, shame-first mentality is the perfect ecosystem for a horror movie. Levan Gabriadze’s Unfriended is the best example I’ve seen of capturing the terrifying possibilities of the digital age: the paranoia of past indiscretions being unknowingly documented and posted online for your peers (and the rest of the world) to see.
Unfriended is told with an unusual formal conceit: It’s a “Screenlife”2 movie, unfolding entirely on the laptop screen of its main character, a high-school-aged woman named Blaire (Shelley Henig). The narrative driving force of the movie is a group video chat she has with her boyfriend and several classmates on Skype; each of them is in their own glitchy little frame, talking shit.
Crucially, Gabriadze does not cut in the traditional sense. Save for a brief, laughable jump scare at the very end, the screen remains static. This means that the editing happens within the frame; each of the people in the call appears from the shoulders up, but will sometimes lean in closer to their web cameras, especially when they’re angry or scared.
The movie also uses different desktop applications as a form of cutting: Blaire hops from window to window with a speed that should be familiar to anyone whose brain is similarly gripped by Internet-induced dopamine addiction. To borrow a memorable phrase from the Coen Brothers’ Barton Fink, Unfriended shows us the life of the mind.
Other desktop horror movies, like 2018’s Searching, deploy more traditional editing while still unfolding entirely on a computer screen. When an important chat message pops up, the camera cuts to a close-up of it. Movies that do this fall flat; the Screenlife conceit feels limiting rather than expansive when you mix it with standard filmmaking techniques.
Unfriended, by contrast, draws attention to relevant information without zooming in on a specific part of the screen.
Because the movie is embedded in Blaire’s digital subjectivity, Gabriadze takes the movie well beyond this Skype call. Blaire switches programs on a whim, opening an internet browser to look at Facebook or switching to Spotify to pick a song to have on in the background. When she does this, the audio from her friends’ conversation will fade out. Her attention is elsewhere, and she’s only brought back into the moment when people call her by name.
When I first saw Unfriended, the execution of this conceit floored me. It depicts online thought in real time, dramatizing the scattershot rhythms of internet use to astonishing effect.
This is what sets Unfriended apart from found-footage horror movies. It’s not edited-together footage that was shot by the film’s characters; we are simply watching a woman use her computer.
We not only see what Blaire is looking at on her screen, but we see how she looks for it. The window shows what she types, deletes, and rephrases in a chat window before messaging friends. We can see how she scrolls through comments on a post, or skips around in a YouTube video to get to the part that interests her.
She is also, ominously, fixated on the death of a classmate.
Laura Barns (Heather Sossaman) committed suicide after a humiliating video of her at a party went viral. She filmed a video reacting to the online onslaught and threatened self-harm. Her actual death was recorded as well; a cellphone video of her standing on a playground and shooting herself in the head ends with the phone dropping and off-camera screaming.
Her humiliation, reaction, and death were online content. Her revenge will be, too.
The events of Unfriended occur on the first anniversary of Laura’s death. Blaire is browsing the internet when she receives a Skype call from her boyfriend Mitch (Moses Storm). They’re engaging in perhaps the most stereotypical high school couple behavior imaginable: flirting, teasingly inviting the other to come over, talking about prom, and playing striptease.
Suddenly, three other friends- Adam (Will Peltz), Jess (Renee Olstead), and Ken (Jacob Wysocki) - are added to the call. Literally caught with their pants down, Blaire and Mitch scramble to get camera-ready.
Blaire opens an individual chat window, angrily asking Mitch why he invited the others to join the call. He says he didn’t.
This is one of many tricks that Laura, the movie’s digital avenging angel, pulls. Soon, she will make her presence known.
In perhaps the movie’s most well-known element, Laura arrives in the form of a default blue Skype avatar. She’s the thing that shows up when you don’t feel like having your camera on… or when you don’t have a physical form to show. Blaire knows it’s her because she recognizes the username, ‘billie227.’
The group tries in vain to boot her from the call. Eventually, they add another friend, Val (Courtney Halverson), to the mix to try and figure things out. Even when they succeed in kicking the digital bully out, billie227’s avatar reappears. She types menacing things into the group chat, warning them they will be sorry if they keep trying to get rid of her.
While the main conceit of Unfriended is that we are privy to someone’s thought process while they use their computer, a great deal of its power comes from the horrifying, unexplainable power that Laura wields through the internet.
Her online torment was confined to the mundane: Embarrassing photos and videos uploaded for the masses. But now she uses the medium seemingly without limit: She can send messages to Blaire on any app, change her music, prevent her from typing, and even type for her.
If you haven’t seen Unfriended, you might be thinking, “Damn, I thought this was a horror movie?” To that, I say: Doesn’t the thought of someone else hijacking your Spotify terrify you?
But don’t worry, Laura can also commit murder. When it becomes clear that the group is unable to boot her from the call, they try to do the sensible thing: Hang up.
Not so fast!
Laura warns them that if they hang up, they will all die. If they stay, they have a chance to survive. This chance comes with a round of that grade school classic game of feigned embarrassment and “Tee-hee” sexual braggadocio: Never Have I Ever.
Laura will type statements into the chat window, and if they are true, the person must put a finger down. If they run out of fingers, lie, or leave the call, she will kill them.
Never Have I Ever (Laura’s Version) serves as the main crux of the movie’s second half: It serves to lay bare the deception, gossip, and infidelity that permeates the friend group, and to archive it online. Blaire is cheating on Mitch with Adam, Jess has been spreading rumors that Blaire has an eating disorder, Mitch recently let Adam take the fall for a drug bust. They’re standard plotlines for high-school-set TV shows, weaponized at breakneck speed.
Unfriended, like many slashers, is a cruel film. It is about doling out punishment in grotesquely violent ways; one of the teens is made to put their hand in a blender, and Laura forces another to die just like she did, with a gunshot to the head.
The success of a movie like this obviously depends on its, ahem, execution, but I think the true animating force of Unfriended is its genuine sense of rage. Laura is a digitized Carrie White, a girl pushed to the limit who is using newfound powers to exact outsized, violent retribution. Just as you can sense the anger in the pig-blood-soaked Carrie using telekinesis to lock the high school doors and burn down prom with her ridiculing classmates inside, there’s a sense of underlying fury every time Laura gets to dish out punishment or degradation.
There is also, unlike Carrie, a certain glee in Laura’s revenge. She was, after all, a certified Mean Girl before her classmates pushed her to the edge.
More important than the violent acts themselves are the images they produce: A photo of one victim’s corpse is uploaded to Facebook with the caption “Guess she finally STFU.”
Before this, that same person’s account is hijacked, and embarrassing drunken party photos of another are uploaded. “Seriously? I’m friends with my MOM,” the wronged teen yells upon seeing the pics. The confusion causes a huge fight. To Laura, it’s important that they turn against each other before dying.
Though it is punctuated by violent deaths, the outsized online high school feuding of Unfriended is ultimately the point.
In discussing Sofia Coppola’s 2017 film The Beguiled, the critic Nick Pinkerton wrote, “What’s lacking is the sense of the awful present in The Bling Ring, with its phantom limb twitch of spiritual amputation.”3
Unfriended is a defining example of “spiritual amputation,” a devastatingly realized portrait of the vacuousness of 21st-century American life. Almost all of us (and by us I mean millennials and younger) grew up having another self to maintain in a punishing digital playground largely designed and maintained by apathetic tech billionaires.
Art often taps into our inate sense of voyeurism; we want to peer across the courtyard with our binnoculars and see what our neighbors are up to, maybe even witness a murder. Social media has amplified and satiated this desire to the point that it no longer feels transgressive.
We spy on, pry, and humiliate each other online because we can. We look for cracks in each other’s digital facades while trying to hide our own. Our screens are windows as well as mirrors.
‘Screenlife’ is a term popularized by director (and Unfriended producer) Timur Bekmambetov.
Nick Pinkerton’s review of The Beguiled for Reverse Shot