A Warning to the Curious (Lawrence Gordon Clark, 1972) Unfriended: Dark Web (Stephen Susco, 2018)
“The template for the perfect scary story is pretty much set in stone, and it’s unlikely that any technological advancement is going to change that. The ghost tales devised by the Victorian writer M.R. James at the beginning of the 20th century will remain the bedrock for the genre as we know it. […] [H]e alighted upon and would consistently return to a basic, endlessly reproducible scenario: an antiquarian or scholar, usually fusty, male, and set in his ways, comes into possession of a relic, manuscript or other object of mysterious provenance and great interest, and this item turns out in some way to be haunted and/or coveted by the being who once owned it. […]
One of the few recent horror movies that gave me the particularly Jamesian pit-of-stomach dread that comes from peeking a little too far below the surface of our seemingly safe everyday existence is 2018’s Unfriended: Dark Web, Stephen Susco’s rigorously conceived sequel to the also impressive yet more predictably moralizing Unfriended (2014). It’s perhaps a film that few would upon first glance consider classical or elegantly shaped, yet Dark Web’s ruthless exploitation of contemporary fears—of losing one’s identity, of being found out, of making one wrong misstep that has everlasting consequences—are firmly rooted in the scary story template. In “Oh Whistle,” the young professor Perkins absconds with an ancient, hieroglyphic-laden whistle he discovers buried in the sand amongst the groynes of a coastal town in eastern England; he later makes the mistake of blowing it. In Unfriended: Dark Web, our ostensible hero Matias (Colin Woodell), pilfers a laptop from a coffee house’s lost and found; it’s not as magical as the strange artifact buried on a rocky shore, but it’s useful for his purposes, and, like Perkins, he definitely should have left it where found it.
As in the classic ghost story, the owners of the object are coming back to claim it—in this case black-hooded figures who might be real, but who appear as staticky, pixellated manifestations of otherworldly evil. Or perhaps underworldly evil: as the title implies, this thing goes deep, man, all the way down to the heavily encrypted world of darknet that has inspired countless contemporary urban legends, here envisioned as a journey to Hades by rowboat, animated with rudimentary, Atari-era graphics. As though they’ve been hit with a fatal computer virus, all of his friends—who have gathered in their respective spaces to partake of “game night”—also are, in a sense, infected by association. The film’s logic is like a less literal Ringu: as soon as one sees the horrifying images, there’s no way back. The excavations of the dark web are essentially files buried deep within our collective subconscious.” — Michael Koresky, A Few Great Pumpkins XIV
