Levan Gabriadze
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Filmography
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The Blair Witch Project (1999)
Directed by Daniel Myrick
influenced Unfriended (2014)
Visuals Themes
Like those of The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity — both of which inspire scenes here — Unfriended's techniques are certain to be copy-pasted into imitators, some of which might improve upon it.
Perhaps the lead character's name is an homage to "The Blair Witch Project," the mother of all herky-jerky, low-budget horror films.
During the film’s most intense moments, “Cybernatural” amplifies the effect of that infamous shot from “The Blair Witch Project,” the one where Heather Donahue turns the camera on herself, oozing snot and tears into the camera as she hyperventilates.
Halloween , The Blair Witch Project and the recent It Follows delve into teenage alienation, loss of innocence and the uncertainty of adulthood, even though each one also features a supernatural phantom wreaking terror.
Like The Blair Witch Project, which turned the first person POV found footage approach into a now well-worn waste of time, and Paranormal Activity, which mounted a similarly styled camera on a tripod to capture the spooky goings-on in a couple’s suburban home, this macabre novelty finds a group of friends haunted by the spirit of their dead girl, a friend who killed herself over cyberbullying.
It does for Skype what The Blair Witch Project did for forests.
Unfriended, which was released in 2015 after a festival run, used the same screen gimmick to much gorier effect, chronicling the revenge of a bullied teen’s angry spirit on the students who tormented her.
There have already been a few others: the rightly little-seen 2014 thriller Open Windows did something similar; and there was the appalling Unfriended sequel, Dark Web, just earlier this summer.
Like 2015 horror picture “ Unfriended ,” missing-person film “Searching” unfolds entirely on a computer screen – in FaceTime conversations, text messages, news footage, and Google deep dives, all giving the film’s title an apt double meaning.
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 .
Other computer thrillers have hit theaters before Searching (2014‘s Open Windows, 2014’s Unfriended and the 2018 sequel Unfriended: Dark Web), but it’s safe to say that this film is much more inventive and strikes some important and sympathetic themes.
The new thriller Searching is a lot like the 2015 horror movie, Unfriended.
Like those of The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity — both of which inspire scenes here — Unfriended's techniques are certain to be copy-pasted into imitators, some of which might improve upon it.
Jason Blum , producer of such low-budget winners as the Paranormal Activity and superior Purge franchises, obviously hopes to start another, praying the teen audience will “friend” this concept — which was directed by Levan Gabriadze but felt more like it could have been helmed by Mark Zuckerberg.
After what feels like 18 "Paranormal Activity" movies, it's hard to make found footage seem fresh, but "Unfriended" manages it by keeping its audience plugged in like a character.
Like The Blair Witch Project, which turned the first person POV found footage approach into a now well-worn waste of time, and Paranormal Activity, which mounted a similarly styled camera on a tripod to capture the spooky goings-on in a couple’s suburban home, this macabre novelty finds a group of friends haunted by the spirit of their dead girl, a friend who killed herself over cyberbullying.
But, like the Paranormal Activity movies (the supernatural; home surveillance; found footage; Jason Blum), the simplicity of the premise becomes the appeal of fearing it.
Director Levan Gabriadze takes the played-out found footage genre of the Paranormal Activity movies and gives it a fresh spin.
Perhaps unwittingly, first time director Levan Gabriadze and screenwriter Nelson Greaves, working from a high concept sprung from the inventively tasteless imagination of Timur Bekmambetov (“Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter”), have come up with a way to distract patrons from dithering with their smartphones while watching “Unfriended.”
Based on a concept by director-producer Timur Bekmambetov (Ben-Hur, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter), writer Nelson Greaves’ screenplay unfolds more like a play than a feature film, a quality that works to its credit.
The most recognizable name is Timur Bekmambetov, the cult filmmaker (“Night Watch”) turned Hollywood name (“Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter”), who cooked up the idea of making a movie that unfolds almost entirely on computer windows.
Written by someone who worked on stunts for "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter" and overseen by the director of "Yolki 2" and "Yolki 3" but not the original "Yolki" (surely you've seen the entire Russian trilogy), "Unfriended" unfolds entirely on the screen of good girl Blaire's (Shelley Hennig) MacBook.
I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997)
Directed by Jim Gillespie
influenced Unfriended (2014)
Plot Themes
The plot is a cyber-rehash of “I Know What You Did Last Summer” and its endless ilk; yet another ghost in the machine coiling to shout “Boo!” Sometimes characters behave logically.
In essence, it's just an online version of "I Know What You Did Last Summer" as filtered through the visual look of "Timecode."
A morality tale about cyberbullying with shades of “I Know What You Did Last Summer” and “The Ring,” “Unfriended” should be applauded for addressing a very serious issue in today’s culture of anonymity-driven public shaming, but the fact that it’s surrounded by so much stupidity weakens its message.
Una cruza entre Sé lo que hicieron el verano pasado (I Know What You Did Last Summer, 1997) y Saw: juego macabro (Saw, 2004) para los millennials.
Like James Woods being physically seduced by his TV in David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, the real horror here is our irritating antiheroes’ inability to pull themselves away from their laptops.
Any home electronic device can be perceived as a interloper: the early 1980s saw a wave of films such as Poltergeist and Videodrome, that portrayed the humble TV set as a portal to scary unknown realms.
“ Unfriended ,” a horror thriller from the Russian producer-director team of Timur Bekmambetov and Levan Gabriadze, is part of a long, proud tradition of visual gimmickry pressed into service on behalf of genre, from the seemingly unbroken single take of Alfred Hitchcock’s “ Rope ” and Robert Montgomery’s subjective camera in “ Lady in the Lake ” to the poly-format “ Project X .”
The faceless threat of the computer screen has long proved a fertile source of fear for film-makers, with slashers such as Eric Weston’s 1981 Evilspeak (a mainstay of the “video nasties” panic) making merry with the spectre of the post-Demon Seed download long before the dawn of the internet.
Back in 2000, director Mike Figgis took that notion to the extreme in "Timecode."
“ Unfriended ,” a horror thriller from the Russian producer-director team of Timur Bekmambetov and Levan Gabriadze, is part of a long, proud tradition of visual gimmickry pressed into service on behalf of genre, from the seemingly unbroken single take of Alfred Hitchcock’s “ Rope ” and Robert Montgomery’s subjective camera in “ Lady in the Lake ” to the poly-format “ Project X .”
The most recognizable name is Timur Bekmambetov, the cult filmmaker (“Night Watch”) turned Hollywood name (“Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter”), who cooked up the idea of making a movie that unfolds almost entirely on computer windows.
Russian director Timur Bekmambetov (who made the kick-ass vampire film “Night Watch”) produced the film and the young filmmakers he’s selected for the project definitely show some skill and a willingness to try and be innovative in how they approach the structure of a horror film.
Mientras Cam (2018) resultó una maravillosa e inquietante crítica a la prostitución en línea, Unfriended (2014) es todo lo que esperas de una película palomera que no innova absolutamente nada y que se cuelga, únicamente, de la pretendida novedad del formato.
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).
For everyone else, HOST may conjure memories of both 2015’s UNFRIENDED, which used Facebook/Skype technology to similar effect, and the original 2007 PARANORMAL ACTIVITY, which was creepy despite a tight budget and relatively few locations.
“Nerve” begins not unlike technology-based 2015 horror pic “ Unfriended ,” with filmmakers Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman immersing moviegoers in a rush of computer login screens and app executions.
Una cruza entre Sé lo que hicieron el verano pasado (I Know What You Did Last Summer, 1997) y Saw: juego macabro (Saw, 2004) para los millennials.
En este obscuro panorama, los adolescentes son obligados por billie227 –una especie de panóptico digital capaz de ver a sus víctimas encerradas en la intimidad de sus habitaciones y de sus perfiles virtuales– a jugar el juego de verdad o mentira; es muy probable que los seguidores de la saga de Saw (creada por James Wan y Leigh Whannell) recuerden la famosa frase, “I want to play a game”, de Jigsaw cuando aparecía la macabra marioneta en un triciclo y ponía a prueba a una serie de desdichados personajes para salvar sus vidas a cambio de un sufrimiento extremo, o también el filme, Truth or Dare (Jessica Cameron, 2013), donde un grupo de jóvenes curiosos se encuentra con unos videos en línea sobre juegos sádicos.
The faceless threat of the computer screen has long proved a fertile source of fear for film-makers, with slashers such as Eric Weston’s 1981 Evilspeak (a mainstay of the “video nasties” panic) making merry with the spectre of the post-Demon Seed download long before the dawn of the internet.
Nacho Vigalondo’s unfortunately overcomplicated Open Windows and the 2012 omnibus joint V/H/S both use Skype chats to variable effect; if we want to duck genre, then it’s worth pointing out that Modern Family presented an entire episode using FaceTime as the stage earlier this year.
And here's where we must be very specific about what we mean: it's not the footage being shown on Skype, a gimmick that dates at least back to the segment "The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger" from 2012's V/H/S , and it's not the Skype window with instant messages popping up in front of it, as in The Den.
Si bien el uso de una interfaz como elemento narrativo no es exactamente novedoso, se aplicó anteriormente en Persecución virtual (Open Windows, 2014) y en uno de los cortometrajes de la primera V/H/S (2012), The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger.
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.
Yet the problem of dramatising online interaction has often proved insurmountable, leading to such out-of-touch failures as Hideo Nakata’s crushingly analogue 2010 adaptation of Enda Walsh’s creaky play Chatroom .
Unfriended turns into a variation of the Final Destination formula, with characters being eliminated one-by-one in often gruesome ways.
While films like Saw and Final Destination have these clever endings that make sense in the establish context of the film, Unfriended just leaves you with more questions.
From inglorious efforts like Smiley (2012) to those hat just missed the mark like Vlog (2008), many have tried to scratch the technophobic itch but none have succeeded like Unfriended director Leo Gabriadze (Daywatch).