The Den

I was not expecting to be freaked out by this movie.  I heard from a friend that they found it scary, but they thought it was mostly because they work on webcams.  I do not work via webcam.  But I found this pretty freaky anyway.

 First off, this is a found-footage film (ish).  But it's done in a surprisingly refreshing way.  The entire film is viewed through webcams (primarily on computers & cell phones).  This was a surprisingly refreshing twist on the found-footage genre.  It follows a young graduate student who is doing her thesis on the way people interact with strangers on the internet.  She does this primarily using the ominously named "The Den" (which is really just an amalgamation of Skype, Chatroulette & Omegle).  This gives a lovely excuse for her to film herself 24/7, but also to film her interactions with random strangers.  We also get to see her chat logs/emails/youtube videos, because it's primarily oriented as a "screen capture".  We see what she sees.

At first it's mostly normal internet stuff.  Some of it is even quite funny.  She's trying to figure out why people do the things they do online, and keeps hilariously simple notes including "exposed penis for entire length of "conversation".  But she also has a few good conversations with normal seeming, interesting people.

Then she starts to encounter things that are... darker in content.  Some of them are obviously hoaxes, jump scares and the like.  Some of them, however, might not be.  But because of the high prevalence of trolling, police don't take her seriously when she thinks she sees a real threat.

What I found really drew me in was a really effective portrayal of gaslighting via a technologic medium.  Stalkers do sometimes hack into people's computers and use that access to make the computer owner feel like they're going crazy.  Files being deleted, webcams turned on and off, and secret recordings being made and downloaded are all totally possible.  While I'm not convinced there's actually people out there killing strangers on camera for fun, there are real people who exhibit a lot of the early behaviors shown in this film.  And that's what makes it downright terrifying.

There's really not much more I can say (or show) without giving something away.  But I'd say if you want a good creep-out I can recommend this.  And for being about webcams the nudity & sexual content was kept to what I found to be a very reasonable minimum.  There's a lot of graphic violence (some meant to be fake, some meant to be real) but not any particularly sexual violence, which was refreshing.

If you would like further evidence that I found this film genuinely spooky, let me present some photographic evidence.  (the photo below is from my life, not the movie)

This is a photograph of my computer 10 minutes after watching The Den

I watched the film on my TV, not my computer, or it probably would've been sooner.  As you can see I have used a chip clip & a sock to cover my webcam (I made sure the clip's edges aren't touching the lens, so don't panic!).    I'm not sure I can give a lot better review for a horror film than that.