When the first trailer for the new horror movie Unfriended was released online, excitement for the film was almost instantaneous. Memes for the movie were created on Tumblr blogs and Instagram accounts, and several people posted pictures of their failed attempts at sneaking into the R-rated film without a parent or legal guardian. Many of these people, however, didn’t think Unfriended would actually be any good. The question becomes, did Unfriended deliver an intriguing and new age horror film or did the film fall flat?

When I went to go see Unfriended  myself this Friday, I expected the movie to be a more gory and horror-filled experience, but 30 minutes into the film though, I knew I had to readjust my mindset. Unlike other horror films like Evil Dead and Insidious, Unfriended does not put it’s primary focus on the deaths. Instead, most of the film builds up suspense by having the vengeful ghost mentally toy with the seven friends on the Skype Call, by leaking pictures and videos of them, shutting on and off their lights, and preventing them from logging out of the Skype call. The trailer inaccurately shows the direction of the movie; it’s not a horror film, but a suspense thriller.

So then, as a suspense thriller is Unfriended good? Yes. One of the main things that the directors of Unfriended did well, was utilizing the very unusual perspective. The only thing the audience can see for almost the entire movie is the laptop screen of the character Blaire. Using that to the advantage, the directors created an atmosphere of uneasiness. The ghost works through cyberspace, hacking into Facebook, Skype, Gmail, and even iTunes. Since the only thing the audience can really see is what is displayed on the screen, the glitches and manipulation are even more prominent.

The major flaw of Unfriended is the R rating. The film is certainly not severe enough to receive this rating, and PG-13 would have been more fitting. The audience they were vying to, mainly teens and young adults, could not go to the movie without adult supervision. Lauren Shaffer, a freshmen from Archmere Academy, who came with me to the movie, agrees. “It wasn’t really scary as much as it was stressful and unsettling. We could have gone to see it without my dad having to take us.” The death scenes only lasted for at most ten seconds, and only one of them was truly graphic in nature. Unfriended admittedly did not succeed as horror, but the movie did produce an interesting take on the suspense thriller genre.