Zachary Donohue
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Filmography
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Eventually others would pick up this technologically driven subspecies of ‘found footage’, leading to films like Zachary Donohue’s The Den (aka Hacked, 2013), Nacho Vigalondo’s Open Windows (2014), Leo Gabriadze’s Unfriended (2014), Branden Kramer’s Ratter (2015), Aneesh Chaganty’s Searching (2018), Timur Bekmambetov’s Profile (2018) and Stephen Susco’s Unfriended: Dark Web (2018).
Taking heavy inspiration from films like the underrated Unfriended , the masterful Searching , and the underseen The Den , Host takes the seemingly innocuous activity of a Zoom group chat and devilishly twists it into one of the scariest films of the year.
Films like Unfriended , The Den , Cam2Cam , and more have paved the way for an entire subgenre of at-home, by-yourself filmmaking that needn't backlot sets nor in-person crews.
Ejemplos que me vienen a la mente: Unfriended y su secuela, Searching, The Den, y muchas más.
And while it’s true that we’ve seen this type of movie before — other movies that call the “screenlife” subgenre home include The Den , Unfriended and Searching — there’s something particularly potent about the way in which Host uses the Zoom platform that we’ve all become intimately familiar with as a fresh new point of access.
While this is not exactly new (see: The Den , Unfriended ), it can still be a fun ride for the audience when done well.
The first time, to my incomplete knowledge, that the gimmick of showing a horror movie entirely through the form of what happens on a computer screen was in the 2012 found footage anthology V/H/S , in the segment "The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger", and it has been a few times since: 2013's The Den, 2014's Unfriended and its 2018 in-name-only sequel .
That gimmick is a new spin on found footage, first seen in horror movies like The Den and Unfriended: All the action takes place on the screens of electronic devices.
Legitimately, it's as formally radical as any American film in years, and that despite being a genre picture; despite sounding like a slightly tarted-up first-person camera movie, and especially like 2013's The Den , it's only superficially the same thing.
Presented entirely in a multi-windowed “webcam/video chat” style (not unlike last year’s The Den, which is also worth checking out), Unfriended (formerly known as Cybernatural) feels like an old-fashioned campfire tale that’s been updated for the internet generation.
This brainchild of Russian director Timur Bekmambetov ("Wanted"), acting as a producer here, would have one believe that this is the first online found footage horror, but that was already accomplished last year with " The Den ," a much more effective little movie.
Other movies like The Den and Open Windows are forced to use fake programs that detract from a film’s realism, but because of the more mainstream nature of Unfriended , all the programs we know and love pop up for heartwarming cameos.
The Den , Open Windows , and now Unfriended all take place entirely on a computer screen.
Si bien es cierto que el uso de una pantalla de computadora portátil ya había sido explorado en dos filmes previos, The Den (Zachary Donohue, 2013) y Open Windows (Nacho Vigalondo, 2014), Eliminar amigo le saca provecho a las dinámicas de las redes sociales (Facebook), softwares de comunicación (Skype), sitios de comunidades virtuales (YouTube) y aplicaciones (Spotify) para colocar a sus personajes en un universo creíble, cercano y cotidiano a los usuarios de estas tecnologías del siglo XXI.