Followed (Spoiler Free)

It took me several tries to watch this movie through in its entirety. It was just a night of a million things going on. I fell asleep on the first attempt, rewound it to the beginning, then had to stop multiple times for phone calls with family. I'll say here that I could really use 2021 to like chill way out. Family stresses are only getting worse not better to the point I've gone back to weekly therapy sessions. I'm having a real time concentrating on anything right now, which is also part of why this was difficult for me to really get into from the get-go. After talking to my mom and my brother separately, I restarted the movie again and then had to pause and rewind a few times to catch up on parts where I zoned out. None of this was the movie's fault, but mine. But the quality and style was enough for me to be interested enough to keep retrying. I'm glad I did, this movie is great. A little cheesy in the stylization of camera effects, but otherwise, cool.

I'll add here too -- the zoning out thing is a real problem lately. It's not even doom-scrolling or getting lost in tiktok or anything it's just me being overwhelmed and unable to concentrate on things. I had to delete a numbers game app off my phone today because I played it for like three hours and just did nothing else. I'll probably add it back when I've got my shit better together, but now's not the time.

ANYWAY

This movie from 2018 is a found-footage but more recent style that's 'online', where we follow the footage from a digital medium. Think Unfollowed, Searching, or Host. In this case we're watching the vlogs of the main character, a youtuber type that feels very much like something the Buzzfeed Unsolved guys used to do. He's trying to hit a follower milestone in order to win a sponsorship and takes his crew to a haunted hotel in downtown L.A. to stay in the same room as a serial killer from thirty years prior.

Over the course of the weekend (Halloween, of course) he and his crew investigate some of the mysteries that have happened inside the hotel in the last thirty years. What I love about this is that once the scene setting takes place, stuff starts happening almost immediately. There are a few jump scares, but they're not huge.

Honestly, I love these kinds of movies, especially like this where there's an ambiguous nature to the release of the videos that we're watching and what's happened to the main characters after the events of the weekend. Also there are both real threats (real as in in-person threats to the characters) and perceived or supernatural threats to the characters. It's a really good mix of the two.

I think if you like movies like Unfriended or Host, you'll probably like this. There's enough of a hint of what's going on, the backstory of the serial killer makes this slightly different than those similar movies where there's an active threat, giving this a supernatural bent.

There is an opening at the end for a potential sequel if they wanted to make one. I'd definitely be interested to watch it and maybe dig more into the backstory they've built up. I'm giving this a 4/5 on my completely not defined in any way reviews scale.

I don't remember any sort of advertising for this, it just sort of showed up one day on Prime. So I'm not sure if it was a direct to Prime or if it was on the big screen in 2018. I didn't really read up on it either. This was definitely under the radar though. I've never been super interested in found footage films but over the past year of all the horror movies I've watched I've seen quite a few good ones so I'm more willing to check them out now. Especially these online style, like HOST (which was probably in my top five of 2020).