Horrortoberfest Day 9 – #Horror (2015)


For many classic slasher films, the killer represents a punishment meted out to those that society thinks are deserving. In the case of Friday the 13th or Halloween, that is generally teenagers having premarital sex and doing drugs. The killer is more than just a mindless psychopath but, rather, an embodiment of the ultimate parental disapproval. So for the case of #Horror, I can at least understand what they were going for here as being a modern update on the things that we as society/parents would generally disparage. Unfortunately that kernel of a decent idea gets lost amidst a sea of terrible editing decisions and an even worse script.

Our story centers around a group of 12 year old girls that are going to be having a slumber party. They are all mean and nasty to each other until one apparently goes too far and is banished from the house. After this, her father shows up demanding to know where she’s gone to and is basically completely crazed. Then, one by one, the girls start getting killed off by someone. I’ll just go ahead and spoil it for you now since it is insanely obvious that it was the girl that got kicked out of the party. Throughout this we get a bunch of graphics that I think are supposed to represent social media and phone games but end up looking like they belong on the worlds shittiest slot machine.

This movie feels like it was directed by one of those reactionary op-ed pieces about how we all spend too much time on our phone if that piece was then gifted with life and an insatiable need to make shitty horror movies. What could have been at least a somewhat decent updating of the ideas behind the slasher had it been slightly more reserved ends up instead hitting you over the head with them over and over. One of the 12 year old guys brings out the old chestnut of comparing people on their phone to being zombies. Worst though, as previously mentioned, any time something significant happens it cuts away to a candy crush meets slot machine graphic with social media likes at the bottom which is just such a jumbled and confused mess it’s like watching an 80 year old that never uses the internet explain Snapchat.

Perhaps the worst is the ending where it cuts to a scene of an unrelated mother and daughter where the daughter is given a laptop so she doesn’t bother the mom. This then leads to a slow pan in on the kid while tons of fear-mongering news clips about how social media is the devil play in the background. Way to hammer that message home, movie. Unfortunately, since the killer ends up actually being one of the mean girls, the idea that cyber bullying is wrong gets muddied. This was a girl that was herself being chastised at the start of the movie for cyber bullying and she gets thrown out of the slumber party for telling an overweight girl to kill herself. In the end it just sort of feels like the message the movie is trying to convey is “Kids these days are all assholes and the internet is terrible.”

I’m going to just recommend you skip this one. I give it a 1.5 out of 5 and the .5 is only there because I can at least see some potential in the idea. However, the slow pacing, unlikeable characters, and confused tone makes this a movie that you will definitely be glad you have your cell phone to distract you from.

Favorite thing in the movie: Natasha Lyonne is in the film for a hot second as one of the parents.

Least favorite thing: There is a point where it’s doing the stupid social media slot machine thing but it keeps putting the hashtag at the front and the end of the words. That’s not how hashtags work, grandpa.

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