Review of Unfriended (2014) by Manohla Dargis for New York Times — 15 Apr 2015

It reminds you that today’s horror movies still owe a great debt to Val Lewton, the producer of cheapie classics like “Cat People” (1942) and a virtuoso of shadows who realized that audiences could be entertained if the characters they watched looked like them.

“Unfriended” doesn’t have Lewton’s poetry. Yet the filmmakers understand that one way into an audience’s head and nervous system is to fill the screen with the kind of “insipidly normal characters” (as the critic Manny Farber described Lewton’s) you’re happy to see shiver and scream.