More and more, anxieties about what we’re sharing online and who is watching are making their way into cinema. Scouting for clicks and ‘likes’ is a new version of the Satanic pact, it seems; surely, a horror unfolding on a TikTok timeline cannot be far away. And the appearance of ‘influencers’ was simply bound to show up in horror, because it’s such a new, recognisable and widely-reviled phenomenon. Influencers are the epitome of do-nothing celebrity, with people growing unaccountably wealthy by selling aspirational lifestyles from their own bedrooms; no longer is there the necessity to even get on TV. I thought Pop Idol and similar were bad enough; having worked in education and run the gamut of students who cared little for literacy because they were going to get discovered as singers, it now seems a lot less exasperating, because at least they were hoping to be good at singing. Now singing seems secondary – unnecessary, even. All you need is batwing eyeliner and good luck.
I digress.
Shook is a stylish, grisly piece of entertainment which clearly knows its chosen terrain: it keeps social media in its sights throughout, even whilst the style and content of the horror moves elsewhere. It’s bleak, it’s often funny and it is scathing – more a cry of despair and a seized opportunity than a satire, but it all feels pretty cathartic. After the fitting murder of cosmetics influencer Jenelle (offed, a little like Drew Barrymore in Scream, sooner than you’d expect) another influencer, Mia (Daisye Tutor) is keen to say the right things to camera about her grief – even cancelling a live stream she had planned. Off-camera, though, it’s clear that Mia couldn’t really care less. This would all be more palatable were Mia not also neglecting her family commitments; it seems that her mother recently passed away, and her sister Nicole is heading to San Francisco for a medical appointment, as she suffers from the same progressive genetic condition as their mother did: it was Nicole who nursed mom through her final illness. Nicole talks Mia into house/dog-sitting whilst she’s away, and she reluctantly agrees. The house being incredibly well-served by webcams is explained by their mother’s illness, as Nicole needed to keep an eye on her and to know if she was awake. It’s something by way of giving just reason, at least: this is one hyper-connected home.
Mia isn’t much of a dog-sitter, and busies herself accepting friends requests (the oddball over the road, natch) and watching what her dreadful friends are getting up to online without her. So the set up and the lingo are very up to date, but what we have here is familiar: a girl, alone, watching strange goings-on unfolding around her, events she has to unpick in order to save herself.
Shook does several things very well: one of these is to show the fallibility of our mod cons, and how powerless people are when they fail, or play up, or get commandeered. It’s a well-observed backdrop to the film’s more familiar elements: together with the horrors of the online age, we also get lots of traditional slasher elements, as well as Noughties endurance fests, like the Saw franchise. It’s interesting that Mia appears genuinely unable to put her phone down, even before the unfortunate turn of events; everyone is constantly on-grid, though, and all the more vulnerable for it. Tech itself takes on a kind of supernatural role, too, with static-heavy voicemails and withheld numbers played for scares. I did find the friend group a tad difficult to differentiate, but we see their names and photos enough by about halfway in – so, again, it’s a plausible fix.
Alongside several of the titles which streaming service Shudder have released as originals recently, there is no lull at any point in Shook and the film busies itself with a number of plot shifts, which keep on coming until the credits roll. This may be a little excessive for some viewers, especially given the nature of the final ‘reveal’, but for me, I feel that it all hangs together pretty well: the tone of the film works to its advantage, and it successfully skates the line between enough depth and enough pace. I mean absolutely no disrespect with this comment, but Shook probably isn’t a film which is going to change your life: it does, however, offer a snapshot of where we are now and crafts an entertaining horror yarn out of that. It’s refreshingly unpretentious, and it calls to other films in the horror canon in a way which suggests a real fondness for the genre. Sometimes, that’s all you want.
Shook (2021) lands on Shudder on Thursday, 18th February 2021.