10 Terrifying Horror Films That Haunted Your 2015

7. Unfriended

When rumours of Unfriended first surfaced, it was then underwhelmingly titled Offline, before being clunkily renamed Cybernatural (presumably by somebody who thought that the movie Hackers was an accurately researched example of cinéma vérité. Let€™s just say that no one will willingly go to see a film called Cybernatural, and leave it at that). The director, a Russian-Georgian fella luxuriating in the name Levan Gabriadze, was famous for nothing, his CV mostly consisting of light, frothy romantic comedies. Could this man put together a convincing horror movie? Can you go from a souffle to a Black Forest gateau? Literally no one cared. The Cybernatural trailer debuted in July last year to muted grumbles of disinterest. In January this year, a new trailer was released, cleverly recut to initially resemble the commercials that Facebook was then running on television. The film had been retitled Unfriended, and the subsequent marketing campaign leveraged social media and the tropes of various apps and other software that real, everyday people were used to using in their real, everyday lives. Brilliant stuff, and it€™s a gift to society that no film called Cybernatural actually exists in any form, anywhere€ but if the film had turned out to be a big pile of puppy poo, all of that creative advertising panache would have been for nothing. Fortunately, Unfriended is a revelation: a found footage film that cleverly subverts all the played-out tropes of the subgenre to deliver something fresh and exciting out of what is, essentially, a bullsh*t story about a bullied teenager coming back from the dead for revenge. Like all the best high concept horrors, Unfriended has a single great idea which it sticks to, ruthlessly and compulsively, throughout its slimline, highly charged eighty-three minute running time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRhUId3gtoE Brilliant editing and visualisation supply genuine scares, some nightmarish imagery, and the pervading sense (provided by the iconography of Facebook, Youtube and Skype, that a generation raised on social media and the instant message would instantly recognise) that this was somehow more real than other chillers. The film was also topical - cyberbullying and online harassment have been hot button topics in the news for the last few years for a reason. Unfriended managed to rise above its less than salubrious beginnings to deliver something both scary and relevant, a horror film that€™ll make you think twice before accepting a contact request from a stranger again.