Unfriended

...or maybe the villain is Sheldon Cooper gone evil...Because you couldn't do the kinds of things that the villain does in this film unless you have all kinds of coding skills and superuser privileges. But I digress.

It was actually pretty interesting to me.A lot of people complain about it not being scary or containing the essence of a horror film, and I think that's kind of the point. The cliches of horror are there to throw you off the scent - the real horror comes from these kids and the depths of violence and cruelty that they show themselves to be capable of. They experience horror in the form of a ghost haunting them as they skype and chat online, but any violence that goes on is nothing compared to what they do to each other as they're forced to reveal their own and each other's secrets.

That alone, to me, makes it worth watching seriously. And the film has a "gimmick" that demonstrates a command of realism that returns to the fundamental idea of the verite style, after so many hackneyed "found footage" films made that term meaningless. The same is true for the dialogue - it's not good, because it's realistic. The characters do dumb things because it's realistic. And anyway, the idea of characters doing dumb things is a staple of horror films and makes for good writing. Characters making smart choices does not a good horror film make.

I'd recommend it.