UNFRIENDED: DARK WEB: The Slasher Gets A Software Update

The 2014 tech-horror flick Unfriended articulated for the medium a human language that had yet to be adapted to mainstream cinema. A half dozen friends’ Skype hangout-cum-nightmare via a static shot of one friend’s MacBook desktop, using authentic interfaces and apps (Skype, Spotify, iMessage, etc.), became a life-like simulation of navigating online communications. Nick Pinkerton refers to it as “desktop mise-en-scene” and cites its roots in Thomas In Love and Lisa Kudrow‘s web series Web Therapy (and a host of other fringe visual media), but for the multiplex, director Leo Gabriadze turned the moving of a cursor into on-screen deliberation, gave every click a weight of consequence and each open window its own unique vernacular.

Stephen Susco builds off this established cinematic language in his sequel, Unfriended: Dark Web, which pits a new pack of Skyping friends against the nefarious, unknown depths of the darknet. When Matias brings home a MacBook that’s been sitting in his workplace lost and found, he slowly finds out its previous owner had an unconventional occupation freelancing snuff videos for high-paying darknetizens. All the while, Matias is trying to patch together his failing relationship with Amaya, his hard-of-hearing girlfriend who’s frustrated with his lack of dedication to learning ASL.

Building a Franchise

Like its predecessor, Unfriended: Dark Web is ostensibly a one-shot film. Of course, there are multiple edits and shots within the static “shot” maintained through the runtime, but like Hitchc*ck’s Rope, it’s clearly more about offering the feeling of a single take than the actual (often showboaty) diligence of creating a single take. Here, the effect aides the film’s non-stop, real-time plot movement. Unlike many teen horror films, we have no time to get lost in obligatory table setting.

We don’t have to watch kids argue with their parents in the morning or meet their new landlord to sign a lease (a la The Bye Bye Man). Without this formal conceit, we probably would’ve been subject to our protagonist’s moral hand-wringing before grabbing his new MacBook out of the lost and found. Here, it comes out naturally, through dialogue that conveys a sense of guilt much more convincingly than the alternative could. Unfriended: Dark Web does, however, mark an infidelity with its forebearer’s formal rigor by introducing non-diegetic sound, bringing in staccato thuds during an online interaction, but that can be forgiven.

The Unfriended films follow the slasher sub-genre formula, but importantly, the one-shot paradigm circumscribes the films from one of the sub-genre’s primary tools: physicality. Although, this restriction becomes a part of the franchise’s playpen as each film finds its own inventive way of circumventing the usual tools of dark closets, creaky stairs and non-starting cars. The Unfriendeds adapt the same utility of those tropes to the nuances of internet windows, instant messages and operating systems.

Many reviewers lovingly touched on how Gabriadze cultivated tension through the all-too-familiar ellipses text bubble, appearing and disappearing, creating a pause pregnant with expectation in his 2014 film. One of the nicest touches that Susco adds to the franchise’s canon-building visual vernacular is developed through Matias and Amaya’s rocky relationship status. Matias is vacillating between three different conversations at any given moment in Unfriended: Dark Web — all with their own established set of emotional weight, ranging from light fun (Skype) to sad miscommunication (Amaya’s Facebook messaging and videochat) and deathly fear (darknet chat forum and various other hacker chat interloping).

Susco has a knack for throwing in Amaya’s interruptions against the intense hacker communications, which get across a central truth inherent in simultaneous online communications (otherwise known as modern living) about the herk and jerk of the mental and emotional logistics we’re constantly juggling.

Hell, even while typing that paragraph, I had to deal with multiple interruptions from different online sources (Slack, iMessage, Twitter DM), all with their own tacit rules of communication style, and all bearing the potential to send me into a Jack Nicholson-in-As Good As It Gets-like tizzy.

Away from the Supernatural

Whereas Unfriended’s slasher was a supernatural resurrection of a bullying victim, Unfriended: Dark Web grounds itself in reality: the slasher is Charon IV, the darknet-dwelling owner of the MacBook Matias snagged from the lost and found. What Dark Web loses in this shift is the wiley way the former film’s villain pit the pack of pals against each other, forcing them to reveal their dirty secrets of betrayal. However, Dark Web is no less thought out, if less compelling. And it still manages a few clever manipulated suicides, including one clearly pilfered from the wonderful 1994 Martin Short–Charles Grodin comedy Clifford.

Perhaps the most discussed aspect of Unfriended: Dark Web is extratextual: its distributor, Blumhouse (or to be exact, BH Tilt, its sub-distributor) put the film out with two distinct endings (previously unbeknownst to cast and crew, reportedly): Ending A and Ending B. To my knowledge, this is the first time a major motion picture has done such a thing since Clue in 1985, which, in a meta-textual stroke, was released into cinemas by Paramount Pictures with one of three different endings attached to each print. Needless to say, a viewer’s entire understanding of Dark Web will completely change based on what ending they happen to hop in front of.

Thanks to the unrelenting efforts of the internet, I can confirm that I saw Ending B. Also thanks to the same piece, I can say that Ending B should be considered for the film’s canonical ending. While I would love if Unfriended: Dark Web’s home video release made viewers choose an ending prior to starting the film, or did some kind of roulette format, Ending B seems like the obvious choice for those looking for a coherent, sensible ending (although likely won’t be the one appended to the film during its cable run).

I can’t speak in detail about how Ending A affects the overall text, but I will say that the ending I saw pulled the film’s plot machinations into focus for me. Its sadistic ASL-based assassination, followed by a coda reminiscent to Solyaris recontextualizes previously-thought leaps in logic into well-considered choices.

Conclusion: Unfriended: Dark Web

While the moral compass of each film differs drastically, both are dictated by and reflect a larger message about the uncharted dangers of an online existence without being didactic or technologically deterministic. That the average internet user doesn’t know the extent of their online footprint with each click or transaction is an existentially frightening notion, and one that colors the Unfriended franchise as a backdrop rather than a primary preoccupation.

At a time when the horror landscape is largely willing to go well out of its way to ignore that mobile devices exist and keep us in near-constant contact with each other, the Unfriended films are leaning into technology. Instead of keeping it at bay because cell phone and internet use eradicates many of the core tropes of the genre, this franchise taps into modern communication and creates a new cinematic language for the slasher sub-genre.

Unfriended: Dark Web was released into theaters July 20, 2018.