It is the the one-year anniversary of Laura Barns’s suicide. She shot herself in the face in front of the school baseball field while onlookers both begged her to stop and filmed the event on smart phones. Her past life remains on the internet – her Facebook profile is still intact, and people post on her wall in memorial; her suicide video remains viewable on a streaming video site with sketchy content regulations; a YouTube video shows her embarrassing drunk antics at a party with the title “LAURA BARNS KILL URSELF.” A group of friends gather on a Skype video call to hang out with each other and plan for an upcoming party, however there is an unknown user in this gathering who cannot be kicked out, has unique control of their technology, and begins a methodical online torture of this group of teenagers. Levan Gabidaze’s Unfriended (2014) is a supernatural horror film that focuses on a group of high schoolers who each played a part in driving Laura Barns to suicide and her vengeful spirit that haunts them from within the internet and their bedrooms. Laura’s ghost (referred to further as just the ghost, spirit, and etc.) transfers itself across many forms and platforms – it is present in different instant message services (Facebook, Skype), manipulates people’s computers within the operating system, glitches across buffering webcam streams, in the bedrooms of the various teens, and as a hardware corruption that signals the cues of pending death.
Continue reading Haunted Data Sectors and Binary Decay: Unfriended and Diegetic Decomposition-
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