10 Blumhouse Productions That Prove The New Halloween Movie Is Doomed

Imagine Gothika or The Ring (or any ghost story from the 00s) rebooted for the social media set and you’ve got Unfriended, a spectacularly inexpensive movie that somehow conned an audience into watching teenagers sit at their laptops for 83 minutes.

The ghost here is a bullied teen that uses Skype and YouTube to taunt her victims, and the movie plays out in real time on a laptop, moving between different sites that fill in the necessary exposition. Which is a cute idea for a short, but a whole movie? Not so much.

The teens are the usual bunch of caricatures (the jock, the blonde, the fat guy etc) so there’s some fun to be had in watching them die off in unpleasant ways, though the PG-13 rating means the worst takes place off camera. For all the gimmickry, though, the story unfolds as you’d expect and after a while it bogs down and becomes a chore to watch.