10 Essential Found Footage Horrors To Watch Before Blair Witch

As is often the case with opportunist horror pictures, Unfriended is really another movie in fancy dress. Remember the fad for films about vengeful ghosts that included What Lies Beneath, FearDotCom, The Ring, Gothika et al? Unfriended has the same bare bones plot as all those, but with a shiny new gimmick.

Unfriended’s ghost 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 neat idea for a short, but a whole movie? Hmm.

The targeted teens – who we only see via Skype – are the usual bunch (the blonde, the fat guy, the jock etc), and since there are no adult characters in the film, it was clearly never meant for anyone out of their early 20s. This is a shrewd move because for all its gimmickry, Unfriended doesn’t really do anything that It Follows didn’t pull off more engagingly.