Warning: This article contains discussions of suicide and sexual abuse, as well as spoilers for the films: Unfriended (2014), Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992), Lake Mungo (2008), and We're All Going to the World's Fair (2022).
Ten years ago, the horror genre was forever changed by the release of the infamous found-footage cyber slasher, Unfriended. At the time, it was not well received, which is not surprising. Any film that dares to acknowledge the existence of modern technology is destined to be criticized for "not getting things right." Young moviegoers quickly grow tired of watching films about contemporary issues that feel like they were made by out-of-touch people decades older than them. Inauthenticity is easy to spot for them, and the second they catch a whiff of it, they will condemn a film. However, sometimes it's not inauthenticity that pushes young audiences away- it's the awkwardness of being confronted within the screen with truths that they aren't comfortable to acknowledge. It's easy for viewers to shrug off a film like Unfriended as silly when they don't want to believe that the seemingly ridiculous themes of the film are relevant to them.
Topics like cyberbullying and teenage suicide were often shrugged off by young people in the 2010s because any portrayal of them in media felt patronizing due to an influx of PSAs being broadcasted to them in school, online, and on the television. There was a general culture of apathy and mean-spiritedness at that time- as if it was "uncool" or "lame" to be sincere. The use of irony as a defense from embracing vulnerability and sincerity certainly continues to pervade today's youth culture, but now there is an awareness around mental health that people are more comfortable advocating for. In 2014, a movie like Unfriended- that so unflinchingly confronted its audience with their complicity in the culture of cyberbullying and public shaming- was destined to flop. A decade later, however, it's these qualities that make Unfriended feel so special- and so deeply tragic. At its core, it's a film about a teenage girl who was sexually abused as a child and driven to suicide by her peers who completely isolated her with their relentless cruelty. It's a devastating story about how technology has become a weapon that anyone can wield to harm others behind the shield of a screen.
Still from Unfriended
Unfriended opens with a video of a teenager named Laura Barns shooting herself in the head on a website called LiveLeak. In the 2000s and 2010s, LiveLeak was known for being a disturbing site where people could watch graphic videos of real people dying. So right off the bat, the film establishes just how dark certain corners of the internet can be, and as the story progresses, this darkness spreads like a sickness, poisoning the minds and the relationships of teenagers. Like the name of the website "LiveLeak", it's an evil leaking through the screen and into the real world.
The film remains contained within the bounds of the screen as a girl named Blaire joins a Skype call with her friends and a supernatural entity using Laura Barns's Skype account as a conduit threatens them with a series of games and kills them off one by one. Within this medium of found footage, the pain and suffering that these characters caused Laura Barns while she was alive comes back to haunt them, and there is no escape from it- because this evil is of their own creation. These characters hid behind the shields of computer screens during Laura's life, but now these screens are not shields- but traps. Don't be fooled though- Unfriended is not an outright condemnation of all social media, or some patronizing diatribe on how today's youth are all mindless, idiotic slaves to their phones- because no matter how close to cynicism the film may inch, at its core, it is rooted in empathy. Although the compassionate roots of this film have been overlooked by audiences for a decade now, it should be noted that other films that have come both before and after it have also managed to find poignance within the frame of a cold, hard computer screen. The heart is there; people just have to look for it.
This commercial cyber slasher joins very different films like We're All Going to the World's Fair (2022) and Lake Mungo (2008) in the canon of horror films about surveillance that have brought viewers back to the feeling of being a 13-year-old child afraid of the darkness past the edge of their glowing laptop screens in their rooms. And even though this film was produced by Blumhouse and certainly intended for a more commercial audience than those two films, they're all tied together by this theme of confronting one's darkest truths within the bounds of a screen. In We're All Going to the World's Fair, Casey uses the screen to escape her loneliness and otherness and creates a persona that may be entirely new. She tries to run away from the darkness inside herself, yet as she travels deeper into the screen, she only gets closer to that darkness.
In Lake Mungo, Alice encounters a doppelganger of her future corpse and records it on her phone. In this terrifying confrontation, she is forced to grapple with her mortality, and by recording a video of it, she freezes this moment in time that she does not ever wish to revisit, so she buries her phone at Lake Mungo, taking a stance to leave behind this darkness within herself for good. But it catches up with her, and she succumbs to her inevitable fate as a bloated, waterlogged corpse like she saw that night at Lake Mungo. Her tragic fate transcends the screen and bleeds into her tangible world.
In Unfriended, Blaire tries to bury her guilt of taking part in the events that lead up to her friend's suicide, but within the screen, she is confronted by a supernatural entity that will not let her forget the horrible things she did. No matter how many times she tries to hang up on the caller or unfriend them on Facebook, she can never escape her past mistakes, and she faces grave consequences for them. Each of these three films tells the story of a young girl haunted by a screen, forced to meet their fears head-on when all they want is to forget about them. They go looking for screens as black voids to stare into, but only find themselves staring at their reflections instead.Â
The idea of a screen or the internet as an inherently haunting force is ripe with potential, and these three films just take that concept and run, using the reflective nature of screens to confront audiences with their mortality. Even as a Blumhouse-produced slasher that has plenty of cringe-worthy comedic moments, silly plot beats, and one god-awful Skype sex scene, Unfriended is grounded in emotion through a tragic story about suicide and the way it continues to haunt the people around it in the aftermath. Blaire and her friends grapple with some terrible things they said and did to Laura Barns that pushed her to suicide, and no matter how much they try to deny them, they cannot lie to the screen. The screen knows. In the end, the humiliating viral video of Laura Barns passed out after defecating herself which is shown multiple times throughout the film is revealed to have been recorded by Blaire. Blaire spends the entire film lying to the entity within the screen, but once the screen knows the truth, it can never be erased; it just haunts and haunts and haunts forever.
Another thing that these three films all have in common is how indebted they are to Twin Peaks and Fire Walk With Me. It's no coincidence that Laura Barns in Unfriended or Alice Palmer in Lake Mungo share the same names as Laura Palmer of Twin Peaks. Unfriended is a film about how the death of a teenage girl confronts everyone in her life with their complicity in her death for long after the fact. Sound familiar? But another layer is added to that in one scene in which Blaire texts her boyfriend who has no sympathy for Laura Barns, and she tells him that he didn’t know her as she did; then she starts to type out and deletes little fragments of sentences saying something about how Laura’s uncle did something to her when she was a child, heavily implying that Laura was molested or raped by him. So just like Laura Palmer, there’s this girl who was a victim of incest at a young age and died alone with this secret. Everyone knew she was suffering because videos of her drunk and passed out at parties were circulating the internet and she was bullied constantly, but no one did anything, and no one knew of the trauma that haunted her, so she died alone. It is also mentioned that she wasn’t the nicest person before she died, much like Laura Palmer who manipulated and hurt many people around her during her lifetime because of the pain that she was suffering from at her core. It’s a really tragic story of a girl who was watched by everyone, but truly seen by no one, except instead of taking place within a small town like in Twin Peaks or Lake Mungo, she was watched through screens- these barriers that prevented anyone from ever seeing who she really was or what she was going through. The legacy of Laura Palmer haunts this film just as much as it is haunted by Laura Barns.
Still from Twin Peaks (TV Series)
The TV series, Twin Peaks has often received criticism for popularizing the storytelling trope of the "Dead Girl", which refers to a story centered around the tragic death of a mysterious, beautiful young woman, and how her death serves solely as a catalyst for the journeys of the (often male) characters around her. The pilot episode of Twin Peaks opens with seventeen-year-old Laura Palmer's dead body being found naked, wrapped in plastic on the shore of a beach. Laura Palmer was a blonde, popular homecoming queen- so, essentially the perfect suburban teenage girl in the eyes of Americans. However, as her murder is investigated over the course of the show, it is revealed that she was not the idealized girl that the people of Twin Peaks imagined her to be; she was addicted to cocaine, worked in a brothel secretly owned by the richest man in town, and eventually, it is discovered that the person who murdered her was her father, who also raped her for years.
Slowly, these little pieces of information that allude to a darker side of Laura are sprinkled throughout the FBI investigation, yet most other aspects of her existence remain a mystery. It is this mystery that propels a narrative that grows much bigger than her, and it is also what draws people into the show. Because of this, many people feel that it is a harmful trope that denies female characters agency and perpetuates the leering gaze over them as mysterious objects to be sensationalized for the dichotomy between their beauty and their tragedy. Twin Peaks is frequently cited as the show that instigated the spread of this trope throughout media, so it's an easy target for criticism. And this would all be valid criticism if not for what came after the initial two-season run of Twin Peaks concluded: the prequel film, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.
Still from Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me
In Fire Walk With Me, the "Dead Girl" trope is completely subverted as Laura Palmer is given agency and is finally seen as a living, breathing, deeply complex character during the final seven days of her life which the film chronicles. All the missing details of Laura's character are filled in with such rich detail in this film which creates this incredibly deep, passionate empathy for her as not just a tragic figure, but a fully realized three-dimensional woman. The fantasy elements of the film bring her story to transcendent, almost mythical heights, as she battles an evil entity that has possessed her father, comes into possession of a magical ring, and when she dies, is transported to a liminal room with red curtains as an angel descends from the heavens to finally bring her solace. Yet through all of this, her tragedy is never sensationalized. It's not about pandering to male audiences who want to indulge in a story about the loss of a woman's innocence like so many "Dead Girl" stories are; it's about giving a voice to this young girl, and then reaching down into the hearts of viewers and pulling out the deepest expressions of empathy and compassion that they can possibly conjure for her. It is a powerful demonstration of the ability of art to bring people close to others and to bring out their best, most human qualities. It's about the beauty of humanity in the face of evil.
Now, decades after Fire Walk With Me came out, the "Dead Girl" trope continues to be examined, only through more contemporary perspectives that center around technology. And while films like Unfriended and Lake Mungo follow the path of the original Twin Peaks show by only looking back at the girl after she has died- instead of presenting her as a character with more easily identifiable agency like in Fire Walk With Me- they never use this framework as a means to exploit or sensationalize her. Instead, they use this perspective to confront the characters in the story with their apathy for the girl, interrogating them as if they are the viewers of the film who have flattened her into a tragic figure for their comfort. The agency of Laura Barns in Unfriended and Alice Palmer in Lake Mungo is derived from the ability of the screen to provoke characters to question how they failed these girls while they were alive.
Still from Lake Mungo
In 2008- six years before Unfriended, Lake Mungo took Fire Walk With Me and filtered it through the format of a fake documentary with bone-chilling results. Not only does Lake Mungo contain one of the most truly horrifying scenes ever put to film, but it’s also a devastating tragedy about a girl who was never known by her family, her friends, or anyone around her. The film opens after sixteen-year-old Alice Palmer drowns while swimming in a dam one day, and in the period afterward, her family searches for clues about who she was in her private life. In direct contrast to Twin Peaks, when Alice's corpse is recovered from the water, her body is not in pristine, beautiful condition; her mutilated, bloated face is a deeply disturbing sight. There is no illusion of perfection for this dead girl. Her pain and suffering are always lying in plain sight, and the tragedy arises from the inability of people to see it.
Midway through the film, it is revealed that she was a victim of sexual abuse just like Laura Palmer and Laura Barns, preyed upon by her neighbors- a husband and wife- who recorded themselves having sex with her while she was only a teenager. No one knew about this until the sex tape was discovered hidden in her room months after her death. Alice was invisible to her family in life, and only through screens was her identity slowly pieced together by her family in death. The sex tape, the phone recording of the doppelganger at Lake Mungo, short clips of her with her friends- they're all both windows into Alice's trauma and mirrors reflecting the failings of her friends and family to save her.
In the end, the Palmer family moves out of their old house, thinking they have resolved everything neatly and that they now understand their daughter after having seen the horrifying video she took of her doppelganger at Lake Mungo. It is clear however that nothing has been resolved because, in a photo taken of the Palmer family standing in front of their house shortly before moving, Alice's ghost can be seen standing in the window. She is in plain sight, but her family cannot see her. They move on, but she doesn't get to. She is trapped inside a screen. Perhaps it could be argued that this falls neatly in line with the issues of the "Dead Girl" trope because Alice is seemingly left with no agency, but it could also be said that her presence which continually pervades the Palmer family's life- seen or unseen- is a reminder for the audience to show more empathy for people in their lives, because so many people go through dark times completely unknown to everyone around them. Just like Fire Walk With Me, the thing that keeps the story from being sensationalist of this tragedy is how it is rooted so deeply in love- in compassion for women- and compassion for humanity.
GIFS from Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (Top), We're All Going to the World's Fair (Bottom)
Jane Schoenbrun's 2022 lo-fi horror masterpiece, We're All Going to the World's Fair tackles similar subject matter concerning how screens isolate people from each other, and its poignancy lies in the tragic experience of a girl who not only is unknowable through a screen, but also doesn't seem to even know who she is herself. In We're All Going to the World's Fair, Casey is not the same tragic dead girl as the ones in the other three films, because first of all, she does not die, and second of all, she has not been sexually abused that we know of. However, she has a difficult home life and seems to fear her father and secludes herself from him in her room, creating YouTube videos to cope. Her father doesn't really know her, and even the people who watch her videos don't really know her. An older man she meets online who goes by the username "JLB" tries to piece together her true identity through the videos that she posts, but the version of herself that she presents in the videos is likely an entirely new persona that she has manufactured, so she is unknowable.
JLB views the screen as a window into this girl's life and the darkness that lies inside of her, but it's actually a barrier between the two of them. She's invisible, despite being watched so closely by this one man. In the end, when Casey's face is illuminated by the flashing glow of her computer screen, it's almost like the final scene of Fire Walk with Me where Laura Palmer's face is bathed in a flashing blue light as her angel finally returns. Casey's words reverberate through the screen, "Some day soon, I am just gonna disappear, and you won't have any idea what happened to me." It's like Laura Palmer taking the ring and sacrificing herself to Bob, disappearing forever. Casey chooses to remain unknown, but in these moments where she stares into the screen, her eyes tearing up, she seems to find some solace. The screen is her burial ground.Â
Screens are all of these things- they're burial grounds, windows, barriers, mirrors, weapons, and voids. Films like Lake Mungo, We're All Going to the World's Fair, and of course, Unfriended have such strong understandings of the power of these screens that few contemporary films about technology do. They're all deeply sad films, but that's what makes them so special. As a new era of cyber horror is ushered in, films are bound to grow outdated in the public eye, yet these dating as far back as 2008 with Lake Mungo, feel totally relevant because of the heart that they grow from.
Behind the cold surface of a screen- the seemingly impenetrable glow that illuminates the darkest parts of humanity- there is always this warm, beating heart. Screens seem to divide and isolate people, but perhaps to avoid this, all one has to do is cross through the screen and reach into that heart.
Written By Owen Felton