This morning I discovered that Windows 10 can apparently turn a computer on to install an important update. That's what I'm telling myself happened anyway, as today I just happen to be reviewing a movie about cyberstalking where the stalkers can remotely turn their victim's computer on and off remotely. We've reached the final part of my mini-theme of social media horror movies with The Den - also known as Hacked in the UK for reasons unknown, but which I suspect has something to do with confusing me and pissing me off when I go to look for the film. Interestingly, The Den is the only one of the three movies I've looked at with this theme that doesn't have a whole supernatural "ghost in the machine" theme.
Elizabeth Benton has just received a grant for her graduate thesis - a study of the users and habits of a video-chat site called "The Den". Being a Chatroulette clone, she encounters the expected number of penii and men wanting a cheap camshow (although not nearly as much as it would be in reality), but one night she and a friend come across a strange no-video chat with a teenage girl who insults them. After that, someone hacks into Elizabeth's computer via The Den and starts to harass her. It starts with surreptitiously filming her having sex with her boyfriend and sending it to her university advisors, showing her what appears to be a video of the teenage girl being murdered, and stalking her through her computer. The police, of course, don't believe her, and when her advisors see her video they promptly suspend her (because no-one ever believes these things in films). She asks a friend to look into all of this for her; meanwhile one by one her friends and family are attacked by a mysterious masked figure and go missing. It is clear that someone is stalking Elizabeth through her computer and then in the "real" world (especially to the audience, who see everything happening objectively while Elizabeth does not) - the question is whether she can find out who is behind it and save herself before it's too late...
For the majority of the film, The Den is filmed from the perspective of computer webcams, meaning a lot of static shots. While that might sound boring, as the film progresses what should be innocuous shots become far more sinister as we start to expect people to leap out at every turn. Could there be someone hiding behind that half-open door? Did we just see a figure standing there for a moment? Yes, there are jumpscares, but they come after genuine ramping up of tension, which makes them actually scary. The fact that the film also uses the fears a lot of people have of being stalked, both cyber and real life, and the idea that you can't always know who you're talking to online, makes The Den actually, genuinely scary.
...At least until the climax. Up until this point everything that has happened has been (more or less) plausible, or at least plausible enough for us to let our suspension of disbelief remain suspended, and then two police officers are brutally murdered and an antagonist is stabbed to death. This, combined with the film's final denouement - a global conspiracy of killers stalking, torturing and killing people for videos people can buy and watch online, presumably on the Deep Web - makes the whole thing suddenly unbelievable and destroys all the tension. And yes, I am complaining about believability in a horror movie because for most of the film the whole thing has been built around its plausibility and realism, and so to suddenly do a 180 into the depths of ridiculous, can't actually happen-ness just undoes all the hard work the film did up till that point. I know that there are people who believe that this sort of thing is perfectly plausible and really does happen, but I remind everyone of a simple truth - the bigger a conspiracy is, the harder it is to keep a secret.
The Den clocks in at only 74 minutes, including credits, which makes it quite short for a feature-length film today, but it uses its time well (mostly) and uses plausibility and mundane settings to really ratchet up the tension until you might feel uncomfortable not having your back against a wall and feel the need to turn any built-in webcams off on your computer. Just in case...
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