How Scary Movies Have Embraced Tech & Internet in Storytelling

As spooky season comes to an end, I’ve successfully watched and re-watched a lot of my favorite scary movies. My favorite time of the year! Something I’ve noticed: Scary movies have really embraced tech and the internet in their storytelling.

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The Halloween Franchise Needs to Chill

I just got caught up with the latest Halloween movies featuring Michael Myers & Laurie Strode, and really feel like the Halloween series in particular has just gotten… messy. They’re working on their 13th and (hopefully) final installment of the series which has been rebooted at least three times now.

As I was doing my research to get caught up with the newer movies I missed, I learned that there are now several different “continuity timelines” in the Halloween universe. One timeline in particular includes the movie Halloween: Resurrection, which came out in 2002. It’s about a bunch of college kids who win a contest to be in an online reality TV show, where they spend the night in Michael Myers’ murder house, and mayhem ensues.

Although this movie was a dud (and I don’t recommend it unless you’re a completionist like me), it sent me down a rabbit hole where I’ve concluded that films like Resurrection were definitely ahead of the curve in terms of how they played with early “internet culture.”

I mean, live-streaming didn’t really become a thing until maybe 2008-ish when YouTube started doing it. And yet here comes Resurrection, featuring Tyra Banks and Busta Rhymes, starring in an “internet reality show” a solid 6 years before anyone watching really knew what that meant.

As I think back to a lot of the scary movies I saw throughout my childhood, I can’t help but notice this trend: For some reason, horror flicks have really embraced technology as a plot device.

Email & Flip Phones Brought Horror Movies into the Future

Halloween: Resurrection actually came out in the same year as Jason X, in the United States. Jason X was similar to Resurrection in that it attempted to bring the series into the “modern era” — for Jason, that looked like a slasher film in space, with cyborgs, and robots, and virtual worlds. Pretty much a complete departure from the summer camp slasher film it originated as.

But why the big shift? Why did film writers suddenly decide that 2002 was the right time to mashup Michael Myers with the internet, and Jason X with outer space?

There was definitely a bit of a rivalry among slasher films at the time, but I think the biggest reason was the budding new age of the internet. It’s around the 2000s that movies (and specifically: scary movies) really started to get concerned with attracting the “new-age, hotmail, cell phone,” viewer.

Another movie from the 2000s early-internet era that comes to mind is One Missed Call (2008). (Who doesn’t recognize this iconic ringtone?)

The entire premise of this movie is built around the cell phone. One day, a young college student suddenly gets one missed call from a friend. The voicemail that follows is a cryptic audio message where the victim can hear a recording of her own murder, a few days into the future, at the hands of a paranormal force haunting her through the phone. The plot is driven by this paranormal force using cell phone signals to dial their next victim, and keep the cycle going.

Although this movie wasn’t particularly good, I remember it did pretty well at the time. (Wikipedia says it was a “moderate” box office success despite being considered “the worst” Japanese horror remake ever.) I’d say that part of the reason this movie did so well was because of the overall enthusiasm the US consumer had for their new cell phones in the mid-2000s.

Just before One Missed Call was released in 2008, the Motorola Razr was one of the dominant cell phones on the market, next to the original iPhone released in 2007, and the BlackBerry. It was around this time that touch-screens were first being popularized, so it wasn’t uncommon to still see folks toting their flip phones around when this movie came out.

I can see how viewers at the time might have enjoyed the novelty of a paranormal horror flick featuring something that was familiar to them, but still new. After all, everyone’s gotten one missed call before — but what if that meant you were gonna die!? I can’t recall many such films that centered so specifically around a single piece of technology, like the cell phone. Horror movies like One Missed Call have always — for whatever reason — been first to adopt tech tropes like this in film, and it’s something we see continue even into 2022.

Skype, Zoom, and the Rise of the Computer-Screen Movie

As technology, and the modern internet has developed, so has their use in modern film. The computer-screen movie — a flick recorded entirely from the perspective of a computer’s video camera — is one format I still haven’t fully accepted. I’ve always viewed computer-screen movies as pandering a bit too hard to the young, tech-native audience — I only just started enjoying found-footage style films like Paranormal Activity (2007) and The Blair Witch Project (1999).

But newer films from the late-2010s and even into the 2020’s such as Unfriended (2014), Searching (2018), and Cam (2018), have really made great use of the video-call as a storytelling format, which enables unique points of view. (Apparently “computer-screen movie” has an official word — “screenlife!” 🤯)

Unfriended is regarded as one of the first feature films to make use of the “screenlife” computer-screen format. According to Wikipedia it was a “massive box-office success” netting over $60 million globally at launch.

The premise is around a group of high-school friends chatting on Skype, following the suicide of one of their friends, Laura, who endured vicious cyberbullying after an embarrassing video of her went viral. During their conversation, an anonymous account joins the video group-chat, and begins making threats aimed at each of the participants, trying to get them to admit to wrongdoings related to Laura’s suicide. By the end, it turns out that the anonymous account was Laura’s unresting spirit, seeking revenge for the cyberbullying each of her supposed friends had contributed to.

This movie was extremely topical, as in the mid-2010s, we were in the throes of social media’s rising popularity. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, were the dominating platforms of the time, and young people were more engrossed in their devices than ever before. Cyberbullying had become a pervasive issue in the news media as we fielded stories across the US about teen suicide. One story that comes to mind from this era (when I was also in high school) was the suicide of Amanda Todd in 2013.

Unfriended would become the first of many screenlife films to enter the scene, centering around video-chat technology.

What’s next in tech-focused film?

It seems like specifically horror movies and slasher flicks have been primarily leading the charge in embracing contemporary technology as a plot device, as it’s developed. In some ways, the scary movie has reflected our society’s own adoption of nascent consumer technology, primarily in an attempt to relate closely to the audience. After all, it is what’s familiar, comfortable, and seemingly “safe” to us that can make for some of the best, most unexpected scares.

So what’s next in tech-focused film? Perhaps we will see a reboot of the Zodiac Killer’s story — blockchain-based slasher, anyone? Maybe the killer will leave cryptic clues on the cryptographic ledger? (🤣) Or maybe we’ll see more of what we’ve already seen in Black Mirror’s Playtest episode — a psychological thriller based around virtual-reality.

👋 About Omaralexis Ochoa

I’m a data analyst, podcaster, pasta-lover... I'm many things, but above all, I'm a creator. I created The Gay Pro because I love sharing stories of queer success, with the intention of empowering and inspiring other queer leaders.