While most horror movies dabble with their fair share of death, it’s also a reasonable expectation that filmmakers will try and make you root for at least a character or two, right?
After all, the Final Girl formula is successful for a reason, ensuring that there’s one righteous, likeable protagonist to take on the masked murderer or supernatural entity.
But not all horror films have the same goals or quality of execution, often resulting in movies without a single character worth actively rooting for. Rather, you might come away from it wishing that every single character just got what was coming to them.
Now, this can be an intentional provocation on the part of filmmakers who perhaps don’t want you to feel too bad about the entire cast getting brutally killed off, or it can be a creative screw-up, where the characters ended up less likeable than those in charge intended.
Either way, whatever the intent, these horror movies all failed to give the audience any characters they were actually eager to see survive to the end credits, regardless of whether they actually did or not…
Screenlife horror Unfriended pulls off the rather hilarious achievement of making its vengeful, murderous ghost the only particularly sympathetic character.
After all, the film is centered around a group of unpleasant, distrustful, drama-magnet teenagers, who are being preyed upon because one of them recorded a video of a classmate, Laura Barns (Heather Sossaman), soiling herself while drunk, leading to her killing herself.
Even as Laura’s ghost enacts grisly vengeance on the group one by one, the victims are so deeply annoying and difficult to withstand for its scant 83-minute runtime that it’s basically impossible to feel bad for any of them.
Though protagonist Blaire (Shelley Hennig) initially appears to be one of the more palatable characters, the twist ending – revealing that she was the one who recorded the embarrassing video of Laura all along, in turn accidentally teeing up her death – makes any remaining sympathy for her instantly evaporate.
With Laura fully completing her supernatural revenge scheme at film’s end, it certainly felt like nothing of human value was lost.
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