Chat or the pervert gets it
This has been popping up on a few movie feeds – it seems to have originated from a strong contender for Best Movie Blog I’ve Discovered Today – Very Aware.
It’s a promo for The Last Exorcism (a movie I know little or nothing about, and am unlikely to watch, being that I scare real easy) involving ChatRoulette (a website I’ve never used, on the grounds that I prefer to indecently expose myself in the privacy of my own instant messaging client).
I might not be much of a horror fan, but what I do know is that since times immemorial the genre has given us nefarious entities with a particular proclivity for punishing the sexual indiscretions of careless American teenagers.
This peaked around the turn of the eighties with a volley of slasher movies including Halloween (1978), Friday the 13th (1980) and Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), all of which played like one long commercial for middle American family values. Well, kind of.
Even the original slasher movie, Hitchcock’s Psycho, sees a perverse retribution visited upon the alluring Janet Leigh by an unwitting Norman Bates. Of course, her crime isn’t one of overt promiscuity, but that of stealing a shitload of cash. She’s up for it though, you can see it a mile off. Besides which, as far as Alfred was concerned, the simple act of wearing a knee-length skirt could be taken a cast-iron indicator of a woman’s carefree sexual intent.
In more recent times it’s become all about playing with the differents screens and cameras that have become so ubiquitous in our daily lives. What began with evil groping its way through a television screen in The Ring (1998) has seen us further tormented by the panic-stricken camcorder footage of The Blair Witch Project (1999), the jumpy and unnerving news footage of REC (2007) and the deliberately objective perspective of the webcam capturing some of the most haunting moments of Paranormal Activity (2007).
With all of this in mind, and being that it attracts a demographic broken down by New York film-maker Casey Neistat as 71% male, 15% female and 14% perverts, I suppose it was only a matter of time before evil began haunting the virtual corridors of ChatRoulette.
Who knows, maybe sooner or later someone will make a movie about it.
By which I mean a better movie than this one:
