Every year in October I try to find good Halloween movies.  My criteria is:

• Spooky, creepy, “something isn’t right” atmosphere
• Not dependent on jump scares.  I dislike jump scares, but I recognize they’re a staple of horror movies.
• Not overly gory or with long scenes of torture, abuse, etc.
• I’ve seen enough occult / possession / exorcism movies to last me a lifetime but if it’s a new idea, maybe.

This criteria narrows the list quite a bit.  Movies I liked this year:

• Night Shift (2023) – really enjoyed it.  Nothing mind-blowing or all that new, but I thought it was really well done and very stylishly presented.  Just smartly ticked all the boxes.
• The Invitation (2015) – great setup, and a lot of tension throughout.  Very much in the “something isn’t right” vein.

On the other hand, these were flops for me:

• Last Shift (2014) – really great setup, but ended being kind of dumb.  I thought the actress was very good.
• Session 9 (2001) – didn’t finish it because I got bored.
• The Dark and the Wicked (2020) – just never seemed to go anywhere.  Bunch of random scary scenes that didn’t make sense together.
• The Abandoned (2015) – I watched about half of it and it just wasn’t gripping me.  I liked the setup and the two main actors…maybe I should finish watching it.
• Identity (2003) – this movie famously has a twist 3/4 of the way through and once I reached it, I was quite disappointed and lost all interest in the movie.  It was great until that point.

The quest goes on…and it made me think, which horror movies are tech-themed?  Your prototypical horror movie is a scary old haunted house but there are quite a few that are high-tech.  Once I started to make a list I realize I’d seen quite a few.  Here are my capsule reviews.

Host (2020)

Not a great movie but a great premise, especially for the pandemic period.  A group of friends get together and hold a séance on a Zoom call.  What could go wrong?   Quite a lot, as it turns out.

Host takes place entirely during the Zoom call, which is a neat idea.  The movie is complete with familiar video conferencing interfaces, frozen connections, and awkward interruptions. As you might expect, the supernatural entity the friends summon doesn’t seem particularly interested in observing meeting etiquette.

What makes Host so effective is how ordinary everything looks. These aren’t people exploring an abandoned asylum where so-and-so killed such-and-such, etc.. They’re sitting in their bedrooms, looking at laptop screens, just like the rest of us, so it’s very relatable.  It’s a short film (56 minutes) but I enjoyed it.

Unfriended (2015)

About halfway through this, I glanced at the IMDB reviews.  Here’s the first one that caught my eye:

Guys, here’s a tip if you want to see this movie. Instead of shelling out actual money, just get 4 people you know with Skype accounts, get in a group call, and then just scream for 2 hours straight. You now have the entire plot, line of events, and premise of Unfriended.

And that’s pretty much it.  It’s not a bad premise but it’s awfully executed.  Friend kills herself, bunch of kids talking on a Zoom call, weird things happening.  Also irritating to watch because a lot of the time you’re observing a screen share, where people are typing on Facebook messenger.  There’s a sequel, unfortunately.

The Blair Witch Project (1999)

Arguably a tech movie, since it’s about footage that was recorded on a video camera and later found.  The best thing about this movie is the trailer.  If you went to the theater in 1999, you’d see a preview that consisted of a black screen with these words in white:

Who wouldn’t want to see that movie?  It’s such a great tease.

Everything that could ever possibly be said about this movie has already been said.  I enjoyed it, and I think it’s a good movie given that it gave birth to a whole new genre of horror movies.  The sequels were not nearly as good.  I enjoyed Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (2000) (which wasa not a found footage movie) but I can’t defend it in any way.  Blair Witch (2016) was dreadful.  And now they’re making a fourth one to be released next year.

The Ring (2002)

Speaking of video tapes, how about a cursed VHS cassette?

I think if you’ve seen the poster for this movie, you’ve kind of seen the movie.  The main thing is the creepy girl.  There’s a certain set of horror movies that are like that.  The actual movie isn’t that great but one art piece just shocks you or sticks in your brain and that’s the movie’s identity.

I saw this 24 years ago and the only thing I remember is the girl, so…

Paranormal Activity (many)

Found footage, but this time it’s in-home surveillance cameras.  I snarked through these with my eldest when they were a thing.  I always like a good premise, and I thought the first one effectively built tension by watching completely ordinary scenes until something unexpected happened.  I still remember a couple moments where my brain thought “OMG!”  Along the way you got bits of a plot through overhearing conversations.

But as the series went on, it became more difficult to justify why there was a camera.  People were running around with handheld cameras and you thought “wait a minute, how did all this footage survive and get edited together?”

There was a lot of hype around the first movie – people running screaming from theaters, etc.  I wouldn’t go that far.  I enjoyed the first one, but the ratio of “time spent watching with tension on our mind” to “time spent making fun of what we were seeing” radically decreased as my daughter and I watched the rest of them.  And that happened pretty quickly…I think we were mostly laughing halfway through the second movie.

And There’s More

Some searching revealed some others I may check out:

The Den (2013): A graduate student conducting research into online social behavior starts spending time on a random video chat service resembling Chatroulette. During one session, she witnesses what appears to be a murder.

Cam (2018): Alice is a successful online webcam performer who suddenly discovers that someone has taken over her account. Worse, the person appearing in her broadcasts looks exactly like her.

Deadstream (2022): A disgraced Internet personality attempts to rebuild his career by livestreaming himself spending the night inside a haunted house.

The Cleansing Hour (2019): Two entrepreneurs run a popular online show featuring supposedly live exorcisms. Their productions are elaborate frauds, designed to attract viewers and generate revenue. Then, during one broadcast, somebody becomes genuinely possessed.

Any others I missed?

raindog308

raindog308 is a longtime community LETizen, technical writer, and self-described techno polymath. With deep roots in the *nix world, he has a passion for systems both modern and vintage, ranging from Unix, Perl, Python, and Golang to shell scripting and mainframe-era operating systems like MVS. He’s equally comfortable with relational database systems, having spent years working with Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

As an avid user of LowEndBox providers, raindog308 runs an empire of LEBs, from tiny boxes for VPNs, to mid-sized instances for application hosting, and heavyweight servers for data storage and complex databases. He brings both technical rigor and real-world experience to every piece he writes.

Beyond the command line, raindog308 has a life-long love of German Shepherd Dogs, high-quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop RPGs, playing guitar, and hiking in deep, quiet forests.

His goal with every article is to help users, from beginners to seasoned sysadmins, get more value, performance, and enjoyment out of their infrastructure.

You can find him daily in the forums at LowEndTalk under the handle @raindog308.