13 Nights of Hallowe'en: Night #1 fear dot com

Hello, and welcome to the first of the thirteen nights of Hallowe’en.
What we do with these thirteen nights is we watch a horror movie or other kind of movie fitting to the festive spirit of All Hallows Eve. The full list of this years movies is available at WraithStop™. Tonight is the first night running to Hallowe’en, which is the thirteenth night. Come back to this blog every day for a heads up about that night’s movie.

Tonight’s movie is “fear dot com”. Today there is the sense among some people that movie A is nothing but a rip-off of movie B. It becomes ridiculous when it reaches anyone in a mask is a Jason Voorhees, even the much older Phantom of the Opera. “fear dot com” has the unfortunate distinction of being compared to “The Ring”. Some event is the trigger for your death hours later is a pretty simplistic plot. This is why the comparison is made, but the how and why makes a difference, never mind the hugely different path in dealing with it. How many movies for instance share the plot that there is a killer who has to be dealt with? They’re infinite, but there are a lot of extremely different movies come out of it. That plot covers everything from Agatha Christie to the latest slasher.

“fear dot com” is one of those movies that just oozes with a particular mood. The mood comes out through everything in the movie from the colour palette, to the architecture of the sets and locations, to the music, to the plot and the casting. The basic back of the box synopsis tells us, people are logging onto a site and then dying forty-eight hours later. The movie’s de facto web browser is very distinctive and it speaks loudly about the world of the movie. It ties in with the other visuals to paint a different kind of world than the one in which we live. There are a lot of interesting touches like this throughout the movie that help the feeling that permeates the film. Likewise there are other events that add to the plot as well as giving the setting its own sense of being, separate from the plot.

Mood: anxious.
Music: This House Is Haunted by Alice Cooper off of The Eyes of Alice Cooper.