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Smartphones Ruin Horror Films
21st-century technology would’ve made Fear Street: 1994 a vastly different film
The ax-wielding monster is just outside the double doors. While two of you brace against the blue enamel paint trying to hold back the vicious onslaught, a pair of high schoolers frantically flip through the two-inch-thick Yellow Pages, in search of one name. Once found, a call is made on the wall phone. No one answers and the call goes to an answering machine.
It’s a scene that could only happen in the pre-smartphone early 1990s of Netflix’s Fear Street: 1994. (Minor spoilers ahead.)
Horror movies set in the present have to account for our ready access to the internet and millions of phone numbers, addresses, and a world of information at our fingertips. You can’t create drama, urgency, or tension without somehow separating your protagonists from their digital devices.
In the early days of cellphone use, filmmakers tried to make smartphones part of that dramatic tension. Remember 2004’s Cellular? It was a kidnapping story with a convoluted tech thread about keeping abducted Basinger and her would-be savior Chris Evans connected via cellphone.
Screenwriters now realize that our simple, analog days are far more fertile grounds for horror. Technology still plays…
