On August 1st, 2003, almost 20 years ago, the social media platform known as Myspace launched and seemingly changed the way humans communicated overnight. Our days were filled with profile songs of our choice, message and friend requests, and we were all dabbling in a bit of HTML coding to select the perfect color combination for our backgrounds and text.
Just three years after that, Facebook became available to the general public, engaging in an all-out social media war that would see the latter essentially destroy the former, and become one of the biggest conglomerate companies in the entire world.
Since then, of course, we’ve been introduced to a plethora of preferred social media sites. Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, WhatsApp… even LinkedIn is becoming more of a social media platform than an employment-focused, self-marketing site. The days move forward, and the younger generations leave the older apps for the new ones. Just as humans moved from letters, to telephones, to text messaging, the transitions from older to new social media platforms have their place of cultural significance.
And just as those older methods of communication inspired stories within the horror genre, so have the new ones. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way, with the transitional swiftness from one communication method to another, the staying power of newer social media-based horror films is lacking. They just haven’t been able to stand the test of time, their rewatchability factor is low, and they seem to be forever stuck in the opinionated purgatory of “Yeah, that one was alright.”
I want to be clear when I say that I don’t think these films are inherently bad. I think there have been a few extremely solid additions into the social media horror subgenre. 2014’s Unfriended was surprisingly decent for a movie about a revenge ghost that murders through Facebook and Skype-style platforms. Rob Savage’s ZOOM-focused Host was a massive hit amongst the horror community during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown in 2020. But even in those two outliers, there’s a major obstacle that both face; relevancy.
In 2014, Facebook was in its prime; a decade in, and the majority of the world was using it as its primary social media platform. Now, in 2023, the youth (have I become that person?) is more focused on shortened, less meaningful interactions through platforms like Snapchat or TikTok.
Facebook has seemingly been reduced to the Boomer generation, and the few millennials still involved in pyramid schemes that haven’t made a full transition to Instagram. Unfriended just isn’t relevant to anyone outside the age group that primarily used Facebook, at the time the movie was released, and even they are moving on to other things. It seems like Skype usage has completely shifted over to programs like Discord or Google Meets.
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The demographic is even smaller for Host. It was released at exactly the right moment when almost everyone who was watching it could relate to it, because of the COVID-19 lockdowns. Now? Restrictions have been completely lifted, and humans are back to spreading germs to one another like wildfires.
While Host was an exceptional film for its cost, it was a flash-in-the-pan, low-budget horror movie that probably wouldn’t have nearly the notoriety had it been released in any other year.
These same rules apply to almost all the social media horror movies that are starting to be churned out left and right. Spree, Influencer, #Horror, #FollowMe, Followed, Follow Her, Followers… Some of these are perfectly fine movies (and some are not), but their relevancy ends almost as quickly as they release. None of these films spread across any kind of demographic blend. Older people aren’t going to feel scared or relate to a story about TikTok influencers. The younger generation isn’t going to care about Twitter hashtags.
There’s just no actual lasting substance with these themes, so how can you have something stand the test of time through decades of phenomenal horror movies, if the subject matter isn’t even relevant three years after the film releases? It’s not an easy task, but perhaps looking to the past, and shifting the focus from technology to the human condition is the answer.
Let’s look at a fun little subgenre of horror I like to call “telephone horror”, the older, smarter cousin of the social media horror subgenre. Movies like Black Christmas (1974), When a Stranger Calls (1979), Scream (1996), and even most recently, 2022’s The Black Phone, where a telephone is used as a major plot device, sometimes even getting more screen time than the antagonist themselves.
Not only were these films known as some of the best movies of their respective years, but three of them are seen as all-time classics, and The Black Phone was one of the best-received major release horror movies in the last decade.
These movies succeeded because the focus wasn’t on the tool itself. People weren’t scared of phones, just like they’re not scared of social media platforms. It’s the anonymity of the psychopaths lending their sadistic, chilling voices behind the phones that people are scared of; Ghostface’s “What’s your favorite scary movie?” in Scream or Billy’s “I’m going to kill you.” In Black Christmas; it’s not something easily replicated through texted words or 30-second videos.
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And sure, maybe a major point of social media horror has been to shine a light on the obsession with fame, thirst for followers and attention, and focus on empty, fragile relationships, but these movies don’t often truly dive into the human psyche behind those messages. They typically either fall into the category of following a self-obsessed and often insufferable protagonist, or the evil within the technology itself… which has almost zero fear factor.
With that being said, there has been at least one social media horror movie that has broken away from the mold, shifted the focus to the human element, and cemented itself as a more memorable entry into the subgenre. 2022’s Sissy does this well, as it uses the main character Cecilia’s social media influencer/e-guru job status as a steppingstone tool for amplifying her psychopathy, rather than putting all the weight on the social media aspect itself. Aisha Dee’s performance was outstanding, and it was the human element that made me remember that movie well after watching it.
As the times continue to change, it’s unrealistic to think that these movies won’t keep getting made, but if these films are going to survive their shelf lives and catapult the subgenre into having a well-deserved place in horror history, they have to start feeling more like a meaningful phone call, and less like a 10-second TikTok.
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