Unfriended Trailer (2015)

Trailer for Unfriended.

Ushering in a new era of horror, Universal Pictures’ Unfriended unfolds over a teenager’s computer screen as she and her friends are stalked by an unseen figure who seeks vengeance for a shaming video that led a vicious bully to kill herself a year earlier.

The film takes place in the bedrooms of a group of teenagers in their own respective homes. However, the filming was actually done in one house with all of the actors in separate rooms using Skype to communicate, just like in the film. Unfriended was originally called Offline, then Cybernatural. In July of 2014, a teaser trailer was released for the film that included the title, Cybernatural. In January of 2015 for its first official trailer release, the name was finalized as Unfriended.

Unfriended was a box office success. The budget was a minuscule $1 million, mostly due to its unique filming style and its single location. It went on to gross over $30 million domestically.

The supernatural horror revenge movie gets a new look with Unfriended. The film uses a computer screen and all of the social media that is common nowadays to tell the entire story. The trailer for Unfriended looks fascinating in its use of modern culture and the everyday use of communication through the internet. Teenagers today have to deal with videos and pictures of them at their worst or most embarrassing being posted for everyone to see, so nothing is a secret and nothing can be forgotten.

Unfriended is not just about some random vengeful ghost but a girl who was filmed doing something mortifying which was posted all over for her classmates and the world to see, Then comes the bullying which also happens online, and then comes her suicide which is posted online. Since so much of what these teens do is through the world wide web, it makes perfect sense that these group of friends would stick around and be haunted and hunted by the vengeful spirit of Laura while video chatting. The trailer for Unfriended is appealing for a few reasons.

A horror film based on revenge is always satisfying because usually the victims have it coming, and the way in which the film is set entirely on a computer with different pop-up screens and buffering is something I have not seen in a film before. Since cyber bullying is a common occurrence, especially with teenagers, Unfriended teaches a terrifying lesson. Unfriended has great potential and could be very unsettling, but its use of modern technology and social media to tell its story may end up being more annoying than revolutionary.