'Unfriended'

I should see this.

I've been studying technology, social media, and youth culture --- to get a better handle on the generation of kids I teach.

More on that later.

This flick looks trippy.

At NYT, "In ‘Unfriended,’ Horror Unfolds on a Desktop Screen":

A Google search or an iMessage may seem an unlikely source of dramatic tension for a movie. But the new horror thriller “Unfriended,” opening April 17, takes these routine actions in our daily digital lives and turns them into moments of fear and dread. It’s one in a recent spate of horror movies playing out on computer screens that might be likened to the found-footage horror genre that “The Blair Witch Project” started in 1999. But now the frights rely on an active Skype account and a strong Wi-Fi signal.

While dramas like “Disconnect” (2013) and “Men, Women & Children” (2014) have grappled with how technology is changing our lives (and how those changes can be portrayed on a big screen), it may be the horror genre that best examines the intimate and unsettling nature of technology and how we construct our online selves.

“We don’t think about it that much, but our computers and our digital lives are full of secrets,” Nelson Greaves, the writer of “Unfriended,” said by phone from Los Angeles. “You type in a password to get onto the computer. You type in another password to get onto your email. Because of those passwords, we feel like these are safe spaces. And so we behave in these spaces ways that we don’t anywhere else.”

“Unfriended” takes place in real time on the desktop of a teenage girl, Blaire (Shelley Hennig). Her screen becomes the audience’s movie screen. We see her searches, her iMessage chats with her boyfriend, her group Skype session with friends and the mysterious Facebook messages she begins to receive from the account of a girl who had committed suicide a year earlier, after a humiliating video of her was anonymously posted and circulated online. It’s a story of cyberbullying and cyberstalking in which cruel online actions of the past can come back to haunt the characters.

“I’m a very shy person and try to live my own little life,” the film’s director, Levan Gabriadze, said in a phone interview. “But with the Internet, suddenly everybody becomes public and everybody is under the spotlight. Every mistake you make is documented and stays there. It really is a tough space to be, because the Internet doesn’t forget.”

One of the producers, Timur Bekmambetov (“Night Watch,” “Wanted”), harbored the idea of making a movie on a computer screen for more than a decade. He said he thought a movie set on a desktop was a fresh way of getting at a character’s internal thoughts.

Sounds amazingly realistic.

More.