Chain Letter (2010) - 2.5/4

When I took some sociology courses back in college, I remember the professor assigning an essay by Ted Kaczynski, also known as The Unabomber. Most of us were skeptical, because we knew him as a bomber rather than as a scholar. However, he's an intelligent man with developed ideas about technology and man's place in society. Having read his thought, I wouldn't go so far as to say it was a full-blown philosophy. But he had ideas. The ideas, however, are more shallow than his 'fans' would care to admit. Basically, he argues that humanity has, through technology, built up an environment that is so dramatically different from the environment it was evolved to inhabit, that it has dehumanized itself, made happiness impossible and alienation the norm. While I certainly think the argument is coherent and even somewhat convincing--has the oddness of our technologically sculpted world not struck all of us in some circumstances?--there's a tinge of paranoia to the view that I could never ignore. Beside the paranoia, one also wonders, 'What dehumanization?' Most humans thrive in the environment we've created. In fact, as with any animal that transforms its environment, our transformations have been designed with our own comfort and even flourishing as an end. What he thinks is lost in not living primitively is nebulous, a loosely defined notion of how things ought to be. His claims are just a complicated reiteration of the belief that things aren't what they used to be, that the past was better, that the changes we're bringing on ourselves are for the worse. Historians have discovered evidence that there were worries that writing itself would be the ruin of mankind. The same worries cropped up about email, and now about cellphones. There have always been those who resist technologies and the way they alter human behaviour and consciousness, and the Unabomber was just a more zealous one of those.

The Unabomber is mentioned during Chain Letter, an indie horror film that just hit Netflix Instant for instant viewing in your home via the miracle of modern technology. In fact, all of the ideas I bring up in the above paragraph are raised in the film. From the opening credits, a montage of reports with soundbytes regarding contemporary technology's intrusion into our lives and its discontents, it's clear Chain Letter is striving to say something about technology and its antagonists. There have been quite a few horror films that try to have something to say about technology, or that are just content to use it, but Chain Letter manages to be an unusually intelligent effort.

The plot concerns a chain letter unleashed upon one student at a high school. The student, out of spite and stupidity, sends the chain letter on, and from there it spreads. Whoever deletes the chain letter is murdered, often in a particularly cruel manner. Naturally one of the students starts digging deeper to figure out just who or what is behind the killings. A detective (Keith David) does likewise.

Chain Letter succeeds largely because the writing is smart. The script tries to stick to the ideas, even while playing out the horror formula. Discussions about the role of technology, and vignettes of possible intrusions by technology, blend naturally into the action and do not seem out of place in the characters' lives or minds. The film's engagement with its own ideas is sufficiently developed that there's some ambiguity about its position. Those who use technology for dangerous ends, those who abhor technology, and those who embrace it unthinkingly are all equally criticized.

Where Chain Letter falters, and very badly, is the horror action, unnecessary and unfitting 'torture porn' that seems particularly egregious in light of the film's climactic revelations. To make a point about the dangers of technology, need one really have a girl pulled to pieces by two cars? Or a boy chained up and ignited via trip-wire trap? There's no reason for any of that other than the desire to create some Brutal Horror setpieces. They are fairly brutal, but they're place in the narrative is hardly seamless. Chain Letter will be more enjoyable if you enjoy the ideas and issues it raises.