Horror tends to move in cycles and adopt trends, whether it’s a fad or plot device that’s worked elsewhere, or a major cultural development that opens up more storytelling doors. 2016 effort Friend Request lets you know what it’s about by the title alone, but there wasn’t much freshness to be found in updating a standard formula for the social media age.
Alycia Debnam-Carey’s plays popular college kid Laura, who accepts a seemingly innocuous friend request (get it?) from Liesl Ahlers’s loner Marina. However, their internet association doesn’t last very long, which takes a turn for the sinister when the social outcast takes her own life after Laura decides to unfriend her.
From there, an eerie video appears on her profile out of nowhere, right before her real-life friends begin showing up dead via increasingly mysterious circumstances, forcing Laura to try and figure out a method to stop the madness before her number comes up. That’s right; it’s a film about a curse, with the digital angle the only real element of freshness about the entire endeavor.
Friend Request barely recouped its $10 million budget at the box office, while a 17 percent Rotten Tomatoes score wasn’t exactly a stellar return. Even the target audience were unimpressed, downvoting the movie to a meager 28 percent user rating on the aggregation site. What goes around comes around, though, with the panned chiller hoovering up likes on streaming.
As per FlixPatrol, Friend Request has been rising steadily up the Prime Video ranks, proving once again that horror enthusiasts don’t care how good or bad something is, as long as they can watch it at the push of a button.