"Unfriended": The Blair Witch Visits a Google Hangout

It’s hard to remember what the late 1990s were like. But give it a shot: A two-term Democrat was finishing his run at the White House. Internet companies you’d never heard of were suddenly worth enormous amounts of money. And a cheap, innovative horror movie captured the country’s imagination.

So go ahead and debate whether we’re in a new bubble if you want, but that’s boring. Much more interesting: Is “Unfriended” the new “Blair Witch Project”?

Here’s all you need to know: The big innovation of “Blair Witch” was that it took a camcorder’s point of view, which was wildly innovative at the time and is now ho-hum.

The POV of “Unfriended” is a Google Hangout, or something very similar. I don’t know whether the movie, which debuts in April, will catch kids’ imagination — maybe they’ll be too busy Snapchatting? — or if it’s the 2015 version of “Hackers” or “The Lawnmower Man” — movies about tech that got tech all wrong, and also got ignored by their intended audience.

CollegeHumor’s Ricky Van Veen, who pointed out “Unfriended” to me, calls it a “screencap movie,” which baffled me for a minute and now makes perfect sense.

So does his prediction: “If this movie makes even a little money, get ready for a glut of every terrible version of the format in 2016.”

Oh. What’s it about? It’s a horror movie. You’ll figure it out in the first few seconds:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lgj4GjqCFlY

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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