Horror Movies’ Monster For The 2020s: Videoconferencing

If there’s any silver lining to living through a global plague that has claimed millions of victims, created bleach-drinking cults, and caused people to try to kill each other over 2-ply toilet paper, you’d think it’d be a bunch of great, socially poignant horror movies. In the ’50s, the sinister Cold War witch hunts us Invasion of the Body Snatchers. In the late ’90s, the unstoppable outbreaks of Mad Cow Disease and Ebola during the late ’90s inspired 28 Days Later to resurrect zombie horror. And who could forget 2018’s Get Out, which delved into the psychological nightmare of one of the more subtle tragedies of American race relations: that rich white liberals weren’t able to vote for Obama a third time. 

Makes you long for the days of simple monsters like  killer clowns from hell.

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Yet so far, the crop of Covid-inspired horror movies has been lackluster cash grabs at best and, at worst, Corona, The Movie. The reason for this isn’t that the pandemic isn’t prime fodder for horror fads; it’s that these filmmakers are focussing on the wrong element. For most filmgoers, the true horror of the 2020 pandemic didn’t involve watching loved ones die or fighting for their lives strapped to a ventilator, but the haunting realization that there’s now nothing more to life than staring at your laptop for 14 hours a day at home while trying to join Zoom meetings.

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Appropriately morbid, Russian horror director and producer Timur Bekmambetov must’ve thanked his lucky stars when the lockdowns started to hit. Not only is a pandemic booming business for horror movies (humans are weird like that) since the mid-2010s, Bekmambetov has been pioneering an unconventional filmmaking technique called Screenlife. The premise of this subgenre is simple: What if the silver screen was just a computer screen? In Screenlife, the entire film takes place exclusively on computer and smartphone desktops. The only time actors are on the screen is if they are literally on the screen via video call, otherwise only appearing as disembodied mouse clicks, emails, and search engine queries. 

It’s only a matter of time before someone’s IMDB page includes the role of “Macbook Cursor #3.”

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While Bekmambetov previously hadn’t had much luck fanning interest for movies that are just 100 uninterrupted minutes of people awkwardly staring two inches below a laptop camera while slowly losing the will to live. But now that most of us just call that “Tuesday,” major Hollywood studios have been banging down the director’s Google Hangout invites to sit down with the filmmaker they believe can draw in the billions of white-collar workers who have been rapidly mutated into Very Online People — their watercooler minds unable to cope with the tension headaches, awkwardly overlapping video conversations and the endless anxiety of checking your phone and seeing you have 142 unread WhatsApp messages.