Social media becoming a horror trope is a natural evolution of the world we live in, where perceptions of reality can be altered with filters and deepfakes, and ordinary people can become celebrities by opening up their lives to strangers. These situations can certainly turn dark in real life — so it’s no surprise filmmakers are eagerly setting out to scare us with worst-case scenarios.
Here are 10 recent horror movies that make terrifying and/or clever use of social media as a plot device.
Influencer
Kurtis David Harder’s Influencer is, as we said in our review …it’s best not to know much about it before you watch it. The basics, at least, are that it’s about an influencer whose luxury vacation starts off as selfies by the pool — but soon spirals into a cautionary tale about what’s real and what’s fake, and how frighteningly easy it is for the two to blur.
The Deep House
Filmmaking duo Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo (Inside, Kandisha, Leatherface) directed this 2021 film about telegenic YouTubers (including one played by James “Son of Mick” Jagger) tootling around Europe filming themselves at spooky abandoned locations. After their latest target is unexpectedly overrun with tourists, they take their cameras and scuba gear and follow a local’s suggestion to explore a mansion that’s been oddly preserved despite being submerged in an artificial lake decades prior. Once the horror elements start to kick in, the social-media plot gets pushed aside — but ‘tis the quest for viral content that gets the characters there in the first place.
Deadstream
Found-footage tale Deadstream follows a livestreamer who’s so desperate to recoup followers after a stunt gone wrong that he locks himself into a crumbling farmhouse dubbed “Death Manor” for a daring overnight broadcast. Filmmaking team Joseph and Vanessa Winter — Joseph also stars — have a blast skewering horror clichés while doling out actual scares, and also work in some prescient commentary about the perils of building one’s entire identity around an online persona.
New Year, New You
Sophia Takal’s entry in Blumhouse and Hulu’s “Into the Dark” horror film series follows a quartet of former high-school besties who reunite for a New Year’s Eve sleepover. This gathering is made ever more awkward by the fact that one of them (Mr. Robot’s Carly Chaikin) is a successful online “wellness guru” who perceives the other three (The Sandman’s Kirby Howell-Baptiste, Seance’s Suki Waterhouse, Melissa Bergland) as content for her followers — even going so far as to Instagram them without their permission, all while trying to conceal a dark secret in her past. Do things turn deadly? How can they not?
Unfriended
This 2014 hit — which takes place entirely within the boundaries of a computer screen, paving the way for 2018’s Searching and similar films — is truthfully more “internet horror” than “social media horror,” but it all begins with a pair of YouTube videos: one showing high-schooler Laura being humiliated at a party, and a subsequent clip capturing her suicide. One year later, someone claiming to be the dead girl pops up online — and weaponizes Skype, Facebook, Instagram, and other sites as a way to get vengeance on her tormenters. Streaming on Netflix.
We’re All Going to the World’s Fair
Jane Schoenbrun’s intriguing 2021 indie introduces us to Casey (Anna Cobb), who opens the movie by staring at a webcam and announcing “Hey guys… today I’m going to be taking the World’s Fair Challenge.” Billed as “the internet’s scariest online horror game,” the challenge is a viral stunt infused with vague malevolence; it purports to “change you,” and it takes the lonely teen — whose only social outlet is the internet — to some deeply unsettling places, guided along by murky online connections she can’t turn away from.
Dashcam
After director Rob Savage released Host — the shockingly effective Zoom horror film created at the height of the pandemic in 2020 — he turned to another technological gimmick for his 2021 follow-up, which is evidenced by its title (his next movie, Stephen King adaptation Boogeyman, is shot in a more conventional style). Framed as a livestream, complete with in-picture “viewer commentary,” Dashcam — which also has pandemic themes — follows an odious internet celebrity (Annie Hardy) whose perpetually recording camera captures first a terrifyingly awful personality (the protagonists’s), then gets weirder and more freakishly supernatural as her road trip spirals.
Spree
In this 2020 release, Stranger Things’ Joe Keery stars as a social media-obsessed ride-share driver who murders his passengers as part of his diabolical quest for viral fame. Cast very against type, Keery elevates what can be a heavy-handed plot by infusing unsettling charisma into a guy who’s an absolutely unrepentant maniac.
Cam
Alice (Madeline Brewer from The Handmaid’s Tale) has found some success working as a webcam sexpot on a site called “FreeGirlsLive” — but her ambitions hit a roadblock when a rival broadcaster who looks exactly like her (and broadcasts from a room that looks exactly like hers) takes over her account. Identity theft is always invasive, but it takes on a surreal, visceral sheen in this 2018 thriller, helped along both by its provocative setting and Brewer’s duelling performances.
Talk to Me
Read our review from this year’s Sundance to learn more, or just know that it’s about kids who decide to participate in a viral trend involving demonic possession, and prepare for a shriek-worthy lesson in why you should never let social media tempt you into doing anything involving evil spirits.
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