The idea of making a horror film utilizing all the tools of an online internet chatroom on a computer screen seemed almost Dadaist in theory and particularly in the lame Blum House trailers geared towards Tweens who can't get enough of the found footage subgenre. The actual movie Unfriended it turns out is one of the best cinematic rebukes of the toxic fallout of cyberbullying, unfinished business ghost story or not. To quote Roger Ebert's review of Mulholland Drive, the failed experiment posed by Mike Figgis' Timecode which presented four separate screens playing at once "doesn't shatter test tubes" with Unfriended. Here we have a startlingly watchable story about a group of teenagers in an online Skype video chat who find their Facebook profiles terrorized by a hacker, or is it? While the Blum House inclusions of low bass levels signaling scares ahead are as unnecessary as the tacked on final scare, no other film in recent memory manages to turn social media's own tools against itself. It's that rare social media driven horror film which forces us to rethink our connection with the internet and how cyberbullying can come back to haunt you in more ways than one.

Suicide Club (2001)

Cult Japanese auteur Sion Sono burst onto the international film scene with this startling, perplexing and often grotesque thriller offering, Suicide Club, about an epidemic of mass teen suicides sweeping Japan. Initially Sono's film was thought to be an exercise in transgression with its controversial opening sequence of 54 teenage schoolgirls leaping to their deaths before an oncoming train (an image parodied in Eli Roth's Hostel). Upon reflection however the bizarre and often incoherent Suicide Club is now regarded as something of a head-scratching kid cousin to Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Pulse for its depiction of Japan's populous either dying or killing themselves out of a loose connection to the internet. Detectives (including Ryo Ishibashi from Audition infamy) desperately try to form a connection between a hacker's website displaying the suicides as colored circles, strips of skin wrapped into a tape-like ring and a glam rock group who may be the gatekeepers to the bizarre phenomenon. It's a difficult and often ultraviolent film which manages to rival the extremity of Takashi Miike's work and impenetrability of David Lynch whose deviation from form will either enthrall you with its ambiguities or frustrate you for closing your hands on air. As it stands, it's another attempt to make sense of the teen suicide phenomenon intrinsic to Japan's bloodstream with an equally contemptuous regard for social media's role in the still unresolved crisis. Much like the world it takes place in, Suicide Club's doors remain open without closure, leaving you the viewer with much to process and more than a few second thoughts about continuing a life on the internet.

Pulse (2001)

Known as the 'Godfather of J-horror', Kiyoshi Kurosawa's 2001 internet based horror film Pulse about a ghostly online virus which threatens to wipe out all of humanity was the scariest film of that year, period. Viscerally terrifying J-horror of the highest order, the Cure director's most popular as well as possibly his most inexplicable work is a vast spirit thriller about existential loneliness perpetuated by our connection to social media. In one of the film's most frightening scenes, a young man named Ryosuke (Haruhiko Kato) new to the internet tries a dialup connection for the first time and is brought to an eerie series of video screens of chatroom members standing still or swaying back and forth followed by the message "would you like to meet a ghost?". Fearing a hacker, Ryosuke shuts down his computer and goes to sleep only to be reawakened by the computer turning itself back on, this time displaying a video of a man in shadow sitting in a wheelchair with a plastic garbage bag over his head, the words 'help me' written all over the wall behind him. The man slowly wheels his chair towards the camera and begins to pull the bag off his head before a terrified Ryosuke pulls the plug. Much like any unwanted site we seem to have stumbled upon accidentally, Pulse begs the question of whether or not the spirit world is indeed visible online or it it's even all that different from our own. As with the progressive technological innovation behind digital communication, nothing can stop the apocalypse to come as more and more of us wire into internet and soon become ghosts in the machine ourselves.

Startup.com (2001)