Cam: An Unsettling Look at Identity and Technology

November 18, 2018.Reading time 7 minutes.

A joint production between Blumhouse Productions and two smaller studios, Cam is the latest thriller to explore anxieties about technology and social identity. Over the past year, similarly-themed movies #FromJennifer and Tragedy Girls have found horror at the intersection between social media and our ‘Likes-obsessed’ culture. This time around, Cam takes us into the world of […]

Technology in Horror: A Brave New World of Terror

June 23, 2018.Reading time 9 minutes.

Horror films resonate with audiences in part because they allow us to explore ours fears in the safety of theatres. The Jetsons may have promised a future where technology and humanity lived in harmony, but our reality is entirely different. The interconnected digital world has given us instant content-on-demand where almost no aspects of our lives […]

The Den: Who Is Really Out There

June 18, 2018.Reading time 7 minutes.

At some point in the next week, I am hoping to publish a bigger piece in The Vault exploring technology narratives in horror. Our lives are only becoming more intertwined with technology and for technophobes, technology offers a vast source of potential horror. Last week I posted a review of Unfriended, a film with similar […]

Don’t Block This Friend Request: Unfriended Delivers on its Social Media Scares

June 11, 2018.Reading time 7 minutes.

This week on the blog I will be taking a look at technology as a source of horror in the genre. Hopefully, I’ll be posting a larger thematic piece in The Laboratory and, maybe, I’ll have a podcast uploaded soon. In the meantime, over the next few days, I’ll be reviewing a few more noteworthy […]

Tragedy Girls Is a Date Worth Making

March 31, 2018.Reading time 6 minutes.

Horror is catching up with social media and its potential as a source of the horrific. Over the last few years, the horror genre has given us Unfriended, The Den, and the dreadful Friend Request. Each of these movies exploited the anonymous cruelties of our “likes’ based culture. Earlier this week, I reviewed the fun #FromJennifer that […]

#FromJennifer is Worth a Follow

March 28, 2018.Reading time 6 minutes.

We’re living in an era that has witnessed an unprecedented rapid expansion of technology. I can still remember using Napster in the early 2000s and waiting an entire afternoon for a single song to download. In less than a decade we’ve discarded MySpace (and Facebook could follow) for Snapchat and Instagram. The emergence of social […]

Swipe Left on Bad Match (2017)

March 25, 2018.Reading time 9 minutes.

SPOILER ALERT: Bad Match (2017) is an awful movie. Not a fun awful movie. There is no ‘cult status’ in the future of Bad Match. This is a film that is so lazy and generic that one has to wonder if it was the result of ‘Script-Writing 101’ group project. Yet somehow a quick scan […]

Ignore This Friend Request

January 19, 2018.Reading time 5 minutes.

This past year was a banner year for horror. Arguably, Get Out and It’s runaway success stories played a huge role in this success. Yet not every horror movie released in 2017 scared up box office receipts or critical triumph. Friend Request, a German English-language film produced in 2016 and shelved until late in 2017, […]