As each character is introduced, they make it clear that this group hasn’t stayed in touch as much as they might have liked, with several of them commenting on how long it’s been. Grace is the first to arrive at the meeting as one by one her college crew joins her.

The film starts, naturally, as the film’s protagonist Grace (Lanise Antoine Shelley) logs into Zoom. With much of the world forced into isolation in 20, these same services became ubiquitous, opening the door for filmmakers to twist their stories in new directions.įresh Hell (2022), directed by Matt Neal and Ryan Imhoff, is the latest in post-pandemic found footage horror films centering around Zoom meetings, and for its part, has no problem identifying itself as a product of the lockdowns, explicitly citing the virus and the unrest it caused in the opening scene. More specifically, the rapid improvement of video conferencing services like Zoom have made it easier than ever to reliably record film-quality footage at a very low cost.

As we spend an ever-increasing portion of our day staring into a computer monitor, it becomes less implausible that the events of a horror film might either involve the internet or actually be captured on-screen. Perhaps it shouldn’t seem surprising that the genre is gaining steam. It wasn’t until Searching (2018) that the format proved viable, sparking a flurry of new attempts-especially given the industry shakeup that coincided with the COVID-19 lockdowns and films like 2020’s Host-to capitalize on the trend. Films like The Den (2013) and Unfriended (2014), though innovative, struggled to make use of their virtual environments, particularly with the constraints that a screen-locked perspective puts on plot development. It’s a category that-though it is gaining popularity in recent years-had a rocky start. If the majority of the characters in the film interact through a phone or the internet, or if much of the plot centers around these, then the film may fall under the “cyber horror” category. Cyber horror isn’t a very well-defined subgenre in horror, but it is recognizable.

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