Three years ago Levan Gabriadze‘s Unfriended surprised millions of viewers by actually being a decent horror film told entirely from the point of view of one girl’s MacBook screen. It was a gamble that paid off in spades. The film grossed $32 million domestically on a reported budget of $1 million, making it one of the most profitable films of 2014. It should come as no surprise that production companies Blumhouse and Bazelevs sought to make a sequel as quickly as possible. Filmed over the course of one week(!) at the end of 2016, Unfriended: Dark Web (my review) will hopefully see a release later this year. The film had its surprise world premiere at the SXSW Film Festival on March 9, 2018 and we were lucky enough to get to chat with director Stephen Susco (screenwriter for The Grudge), producer Timur Bekmambetov (director of Wanted and Night Watch) and actor Colin Woodell (Unsane) about the film.
PG-13 Horror
The first Unfriended had some brutal kills for its characters, including but not limited to creative uses of such household items like a curling iron and a blender. Susco opted to leave out the graphic violence when making Unfriended: Dark Web. In fact, he wanted to make it as different as possible. “I wanted to do PG-13 instead of R,” he said. “I didn’t want to have graphic kills. I wanted all the kills off camera and do more of a thriller than a horror movie.”
The phrase “PG-13 horror” has a negative connotation within the horror community. After all, how can any horror film be good if it isn’t rated R (that was sarcasm, by the way)? It’s a long-fought debate among horror fans and it’s unfounded. There are plenty of good PG-13-rated horror movies just like there are plenty of bad R-rated horror movies. If the subject matter of the film doesn’t lend itself to the R-rating, then why try to force it? That being said, I had to ask Susco if the PG-13 mindset was for marketing purposes, to which he responded:
“It wasn’t really marketing. That’s the thing I love about horror. The fans are so aggressively passionate that there’s in-fighting because there’s so many flavors of horror. I mean I’ll see anything, no matter what it is. I have my favorites, and my favorites are a little more suspenseful. A little more slowly paced. Like Alien, The Thing, The Shining, like those are my go-tos. I wanted to direct something that was in my kind of favorite wheelhouse. So that’s really what attracted me to this too. This is all suspense. It’s all just kind of setting up mechanical things and seeing how long we can take the audience where they know something’s coming that the cast doesn’t know is coming. But I think PG-13 would be great for marketing. I don’t know if we’re going to get a PG-13 though…It’s strange because in Marvel movies you have people getting decapitated and impaled and you see horrible, horrible things happen to people and they’re still PG-13.”
Susco has a point. Last year’s Kong: Skull Island sees a side character get impaled Cannibal Holocaust-style by the leg of a giant spider and that film somehow got away with a PG-13 rating.
Horror Vs. Thriller
Whenever a horror film gets even a modicum of recognition, studios and critics alike are apt to refer to it as anything but a horror film (just look at Get Out‘s classification as a comedy at the Golden Globes). Many fans (myself included) see this trend as a way to make the horror genre seem “less than.” Throughout history, horror has often been seen as an inferior genre that doesn’t have much substance.
When Susco said he sought out to make Unfriended: Dark Web more of a thriller and less of a horror film, I asked him what he thought about the issue. Woodell chimed in to defend Susco, saying “There was something far more terrifying [about Dark Web] and I personally am not a horror guy, but I love thrillers and for me that’s also what I would rather watch: something that could be real as opposed to something that is too absurd. That terrified me more so [than a ghost].” Bekmambetov was equally perplexed by the question, adding “I don’t think that’s a serious question because what’s important is the result. I saw yesterday how much people jumped and how scared they were and the reason is to enjoy the scare. It doesn’t matter what you call it.”
Whatever genre of film it is, I’m excited for audiences to get to see the film whenever it sees a release. It definitely has more in common with the superb The Den than Unfriended, but it’s still very much it’s own thing.
Unfriended: Dark Web will be released in theaters nationwide later this year. No release date has been set.
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