CAN’T TAKE IT BACK (2017) and the problem with social-media horror
#31DaysOfHorror: October 29
This October, I’ll be reviewing 31 horror movies in 31 days! You can see the ongoing list of what I’ve watched and reviewed here.
I suspect that in a few decades, movies like Can’t Take It Back, Friend Request (2017), and Unfriended (2015) will be of some interest to film historians, the same way we look back with renewed interest at the slashers of the 80s for what they reveal about Reagan-era cultural anxieties. We are not in a teen horror cycle right now; instead, the biggest horror movies are more classic, slow-burn, suspenseful horror films like The Conjuring and its various sequels and spinoffs. It’s interesting, then, that many of the few teen horror movies that are produced deal with supernatural extensions of this current age of social media and its related anxieties — cyberbullying, truth vs. fiction, digital friendships vs. real-world ones.
But, unfortunately, many social-media horror movies are forgetting to do one thing: be scary. Cyberbullying is scary enough for those on the receiving end; it feels like what’s happening online is your entire world, and it’s impossible to get away from it like it used to be possible to escape bullies at home. Unfriended is the best of these movies and worked because of the conceit that everything in the film takes place on one laptop screen. It treated the characters’ cyberbullying of another girl with real gravity, and it walks a tight tonal line between disturbing teen drama and supernatural weirdness. Subpar follow-ups like Friend Request and Can’t Take It Back try to take the haunted-Facebook-profile action off the computer screen and into the real world, and the effects just aren’t the same.
Can’t Take It Back is about a girl named Kristen who moves to a new school. At a party with her new classmates, she is peer-pressured into leaving a hurtful comment on another girl’s Facebook page, where someone has posted a nude picture clearly meant to stay private. The next day, Kristen regrets what she’s done, but for some reason, Facebook isn’t letting her delete the comment. She soon learns that the girl whose profile she mocked has been dead for a while, and no one is quite sure who’s maintaining her profile. Then, more students who teased her online begin to die, convinced that Morgan is coming after them…
Neither serious enough to be an actual exploration of cyberbullying and its related trauma, nor consistently campy enough to be a real guilty pleasure, Can’t Take It Back is a disappointment on every level. The ghost who is haunting the social media of the local teenagers is uninspired and laughable; she moves like someone saw a J-Horror movie fifteen years ago and can’t quite remember what it was about those movies that made the ghosts legitimately creepy.
Kristen’s friend Nicole is the first to be stalked and driven insane by the ghost, and her whole storyline is full of silly, fun moments that are exactly what I want from a movie like this. The whole subplot is silly, but it’s the perfect level of campy while still being a reflection of anxieties sparked by the social media age. For example, there’s a jump-scare request for nudes.
However, when Nicole exits the film for reasons I won’t get into, the whole thing devolves into a dour, joyless race to uncover the origins of the creepy ghost in the Facebook page. There are several psychics and psychiatrists, and there are flashbacks to a weird school where other girls jump you and beat you up if someone posts pictures of you naked online, and lots of people have their wrists slashed with pieces of glass.
Also, noted Vine-bro and racist prankster Logan Paul plays a viral-video-prankster bro named Clint Plotkin, which I have added to my list of amazing horror movie names I’ve encountered this month (along with Tree Gelbman and Squeamy Ellis) but is otherwise a clear sign that you should steer clear of this movie.
Like Friend Request, which came out a few months ago, Can’t Take It Back is a lot scarier when it sticks to the thoughtlessly cruel ways that teenagers can cause each other pain, and is far less interesting the fifth or sixth time a pale-faced ghost pops up behind someone on their webcam. Give me a modern slasher movie where someone gets revenge on the people who bullied them online, rather than yet another spirit mucking around with the source code of Facebook and causing ~scary error messages.~ Until social media horror movies can figure out a better way to successfully marry the real-life horrors of cyberbullying with horror genre conventions, this little subgenre boomlet is destined to remain a future curiosity rather than a current force to be reckoned with.
But where can I watch it? Can’t Take It Back is streaming on Shudder.
