Tech horror, by its very nature, is a bit of a doomed beast.
Aside from a few excellent anomalies that have bucked the curse of the genre, horror that relies on technology as a starting point is pretty much cursed from the moment of its conception – cursed to look horrendously dated within a matter of years if not months, for actors to po-facedly deliver dialogue that sounds like it would have been pinged back and forth on MSN messenger in the late 90s regardless of when it was actually made. Look at any of The X-Files’ dreadful tech episodes if you don’t believe me – tech horror is a genre with built-in limitations, and that’s just the way it is.
Which is not to say that I don’t kind of love it anyway, especially when it focuses on scary stories of the internet and beyond. I’m a big fan of creepypastas and other kinds of internet folklore, and a lot of the tech horror of the late nineties and early noughties overlaps with the type of storytelling that would come to be a staple in the creepypasta genre in years to come. All this to say: here’s a fond roast of 2002’s FeardotCom, and perhaps a smidgen of a defence of it too!
FeardotCom is director William Malone’s follow-up to the moderately not-terrible 1999 House on Haunted Hill remake, and it was one of the first horror movies I ever remember feeling really intrigued by as a kid. I didn’t watch it for a few years after it came out, but the eerie poster and techy title had me hunting it down as soon as I was brave enough to give it a watch.
And it’s precisely the kind of thing you’d expect to find from a first-time poster on R/NoSleep; people start dropping dead in bizarre ways after their computers crash, leading to the discovery that they’ve been exposed to the video of a violent torture-murder and are thus haunted by visions of their own worst fears. Blah blah, serial killer’s victim is haunting a website for revenge, etc. You get the idea.
And the idea, for the most part, is truly pretty awful. Stephen Dorff and Natascha McElhone struggle through a clunky, clumsy, hysterically dated script that mostly seems to consist of people shooting dramatic glances at unplugged HDMI cables; the gore and violence is as tasteless and exploitative as you’d expect from a movie of this era. The headache-inducing editing doesn’t let a shot linger for anything more than two seconds straight, it’s loud, it’s ugly, it’s gross, and is none of those things in a particularly interesting way.
Well, until the final act, that is. Look, here’s where my apologism comes in, because I actually think the last half-hour or so of this movie is pretty damn strong. While it’s set in New York, the film was mostly shot in Canada on soundstages, and it lends the film a sense of unreality that doesn’t match with the grittiness that Malone is attempting to pull off in the first couple of acts. But, in the finale, as our leading characters are tormented with visions of the things that scare them the most, it really works, lending the movie at almost Doctor Caligari feel of strangeness and offness. Stephen Rea, playing the serial killer who kicked off the events of the movie, is genuinely pretty great, and what Malone does with the trippy visuals and nightmarish horrors still stands up pretty well, over two decades later.
It’s not enough to save the film by a long shot, but it’s proof that Malone had some chops when it came to creating a distinct feel for his horror. FeardotCom still holds a special place in my heart, even if I know, functionally, it’s pretty awful – and it’s been cursed by the tech horror mark of dating with a spectacular lack of grace. Have you seen FeardotCom? What did you think of it? How does it stand up now? Let me know in the comments!
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By Lou MacGregor
(header image via It All Happens in the Dark)
No But Listen 