I decided to step out of my comfort zone again and review another new horror movie.

What’s It About? One year after the suicide of their classmate Laura, six teenagers connected to the event are haunted by a vengeful spirit… in the middle of a group chat on Skype.

STRAIGHT UP: Scary, fresh, and fun, despite some flaws. 8/10

What I Liked

The gimmick – I’ve never seen a poltergeist use social media as a weapon before. Not only are the ghost’s methods clever (and sometimes darkly funny), but the novelty of the haunt keeps things unpredictable.

Appropriately unlikable protagonists – This is a “dead teenager movie” that goes the extra mile to make an argument for why these particular teenagers should die.

Believable characterization – Many horror films thrive on contrived bad decisions by their main characters, but the bad decisions made by the cast of Unfriended feel exactly like the sort of choices actual modern teenagers in their situation might make.

Clever integration of horror tropes – Unfriended uses some pretty traditional spooks and cues, but deploys them in fun ways. For example, early in the Skype call, one character’s audio is constantly interrupted by her dog barking offscreen…

It’s actually scary – Or at least, I thought so. I spook easily, so your mileage may vary.

What I Disliked

Sit down and shut up – There are a few scenes where all of the characters freak out and start shouting over each other, resulting in a lot of incoherent noise. These run too long and are obnoxious.

Screen blur sucks – Audio and visual distortions are used to create a spooky atmosphere, but they eventually lose their effectiveness and become annoying.

The ending – The director was literally seconds away from sticking the landing here, but couldn’t resist pulling a tired “last-second jump scare” trick.

CLOSING THOUGHT: When I first saw the trailer for Unfriended, I thought it was a joke, but the final product quickly won me over. The concept is innovative, the style is unique, and the horror itself explores relevant subjects that should be familiar to those who grew up online. Given its solid critical reviews to this point, Unfriended will likely serve as inspiration to many future scary movies, some of which will doubtlessly try to do its gimmick even better. I, for one, am pretty excited about that.