In The Watchers, a navigation app becomes glitchy.
When one quick call can eliminate danger and undermine screams, filmmakers have to figure out a workaround. Sometimes it can even deepen a story.
A cellphone lies in a rustic Airbnb, smashed by an intruder. Then, when another is procured, a faulty connection interrupts a call to 911.
A navigation map on a smartphone glitches as a driver plunges deep into the woods.
Criminals on a kidnapping job are ordered to surrender their phones “to be completely certain that you can’t be tracked.”
An exasperated partier in rural Ontario wonders aloud to a member in his group, “How long is it going to take for you to realize there’s no reception out here?”
These are some of the ways that recent horror movies have gotten around what is at this point an age-old problem: the cellphone. In working order, they can render predicaments more solvable and certain situations easier to escape — potentially. Before the late ‘90s, there was little need to make such a show of connectivity failure. Lines would go down or get cut, sure, but isolation in the age before mass cellphone usage was easier to come by and therefore easier to believe onscreen. Back then, the tropes didn’t have to trope so hard.
Then came the cell, and movies like House on Haunted Hill (1999) and Jeepers Creepers (2001) featured characters realising they were holding useless plastic flip-bricks as their situations grew hairy. (In the former, the possessed house kills the signal before any of its inhabitants; in the latter, young adult siblings bicker over a low battery notification after witnessing what turns out to be a winged demon.) With smartphones, there was even more to neutralise, like GPS maps and internet searches. Movies taking pains to explain away cellphones were so prevalent that by 2009, I could collect more than 40 clips for a supercut exploring this development in the previous decade or so.
But the recent examples above (from this year’s The Strangers: Chapter 1, The Watchers, Abigail and In a Violent Nature) show that horror remains gripped by a certain disconnection tension. It is perhaps even more pronounced as our tethers to these devices have only strengthened with time.
While some movies come off as cliched when treating the cellphone issue as a formality that must be resolved as perfunctorily as possible, others have gotten creative. And the continued ubiquity reflects a certain unease many of us feel when we are off the grid in real life, whether or not we’re in the crosshairs of a maniac. In many examples, the unreliable cellphone is not just a facilitator of the horror — it’s a key element to it. Maybe it’s Pavlovian at this point, but the lack of a working cellphone can scan as an inherently horrific situation.
Here is a look at the various ways horror cinema navigates the cellphone problem.
The lack of a working signal plagues characters across subgenres — apocalyptic survival stories (Bird Box and Knock at the Cabin), deadly eat-the-rich sendups (The Menu), found-footage ghost stories (Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin) and single-setting supernatural standoffs (Evil Dead Rise, in which an earthquake both knocks out the network and opens a sealed realm with haunted artefacts).
Granted, many characters elect to put themselves in situations where they can’t be reached. As one character explains to his friends in the meta-slasher The Cabin in the Woods, getting off the grid and secluding themselves in the cabin is “the entire point.” The similarly smarty-pants neo-slasher Bodies Bodies Bodies is premised on faulty communication among its characters and an inability to contact the authorities when things get weird — so much so that the movie’s final words acknowledge the return of reception and land like a punchline.
This is the most basic (and probably most common) of horror’s cellphone tropes and sometimes plays like a deus ex machina. Very convenient. Perhaps to counter this, some stories place the lack of reception in their villains’ hands via a signal scrambler (You’re Next, The Blackening) or a curse (Hocus Pocus 2).
Sam Esmail’s end-days parable, Leave the World Behind, has so many references to lost service that a substantial supercut could be made from its clips alone. In the first conversation between all four principal adult characters, each mentions the lack of reception. Throughout the movie, this affects more than cellphones — an iPad, a TV and, most maddeningly, a satellite phone. The culprit turns out to be a cyberattack that has annihilated the grid, the first prong in a scheme for “the most cost effective way to destabilise a country.”
If cellphones are a modern convenience, having to charge them is a modern inconvenience. But only so many characters can be credulously shortsighted or put out by that inconvenience. Don’t Breathe, in which a group of thieves picks the wrong blind muscle daddy to rob, devises a novel yet realistic way to drain its characters’ juice: too much flashlight use. It dies and leaves them in the dark. In Get Out, the dying battery of Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) is a way of signalling high stakes: It’s a result of sabotage inflicted by the body-snatched housekeeper, Georgina (Betty Gabriel), who like Chris is one of the few Black people in an affluent, racist white environment. Without a powered-up phone, he can’t communicate with the outside world. And in a culture that has not tended to believe Black people, phones are a tool for documenting injustice (galvanising activism in police shootings, for instance), so sapping Chris’s battery also functions as social commentary.
A lesser trope, the broken cellphone can serve not only to cut off victims from the outside world, but also to externalise the threat posed by a villain. In Crawl, a woman trapped in a Florida house with giant alligators during a hurricane drops her cell as she’s trying to transport her unconscious father to a part of the basement inaccessible to the reptiles. The dropped phone draws her into harm’s way, but her efforts are for naught anyway because one gator casually destroys it with a single stomp. In Thanksgiving, a victim’s newly disfigured cheek causes a facial-recognition failure and renders the phone unusable. And in the 2018 Halloween sequel, a phone-dependent teen has a confrontation with her boyfriend, who snatches away her ringing “precious phone” and throws it in a bowl of something beige and thick (perhaps eggnog?). This ratchets up the tension as her grandmother Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) tries to frantically reach her to warn her she’s in imminent danger from serial killer-at-large Michael Myers. Here, the nonfunctioning phone does not bespeak certain death but creates stressful complications in dodging the eternal boogeyman gliding slowly through the night.
The first thing an intruder does upon entry in the Covid-era slasher Sick is steal the phones of everyone staying in a lake house. In Hush (2016), the killer takes the deaf protagonist’s phone, then sends her pictures of herself from different places in the house (she sees them via her computer, which is later rendered useless when the power is cut and with it goes the internet). But there’s a twist on the stolen-phone trope that finds characters consciously giving up their phones (however grudgingly) to their peril. This happens as crowds enter buildings in The Banana Splits Movie and Haunt (both 2019). In the latter, one character snarks to another, “I just think that’s probably going to be the scariest part for you: not having your phone on you at all times.” Imagine!
Then there are the anti-tropes. In A Quiet Place Part II, a usable cellphone is a liability — as a mysterious-creature attack destabilises a small town, some residents hide in a restaurant. One’s cellphone rings out in the silence, prompting a sound-attracted monster to commence havoc. In One Missed Call, the terror is coming specifically from the phone and disabling it is futile. And the Scream franchise has long been premised on the peril in connectivity, starting with the original’s opening scene when Drew Barrymore’s character is forced to compete in a sadistic round of horror-movie trivia by landline. The first rule of survival, according to its 2022 instalment, simply titled Scream, is don’t answer the phone. The attacks are so swift that calling the cops would be largely ineffective anyway. One of the rare times that a lack of reception has plagued this franchise’s extended universe occurs in the most recent entry, the New York-set Scream VI, during a subway scene. Those who ride the subway know that there could be no other way.
There are also times when alerting authorities does no good, as in Barbarian, when a character is informed that the Detroit police have no available units at the moment. Other movies avoid the issue entirely by virtue of being set in a simpler time in which cellphones weren’t in widespread use, if at all — this year Longlegs, The First Omen and MaXXXine throw back to past eras and, in the process, throw phones out of the mix.
Finally, films like Midsommar make little attempt to interrupt connectivity. They imply that not much in the way of communicating could be done to save victims from their situations — a truly horrific prospect for these connected times, indeed.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Rich Juzwiak
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
Her new novel, No One Will Know, explores motherhood, illegal adoption, and dark secrets.