Dead Cell Phones in Horror

While watching horror movies in these modern times, you’ll always find that one of the many plot points involves technology. It never really points to it in the positive, in fact, many times you’ll end up seeing negative actions in regards to it. This is especially true when dealing with cellular communication, which many of us take for granted. Sure, in real life, when out far, we depend on certain functions and coverage to help us out, and for those that utilize best orange deals, or something like that, it seems to be quite reliable. However, what about the people in the movies? It seems cliché to lose signal right when you need it most.

There are a lot of movies that this happens in. Most recent in my memory is none other than the horror piece that was The Ruins. That film needed a phone bad, because if there was just a little bit of communication to the outside world, things would have been a lot better for our college kids trying to escape the clutches of a curse on Mexican soil.

Signal plays a role in a lot of ways, especially when it’s no longer an option to use when moving forward in a plot. For instance, that of the plot points in The Human Centipede, or better yet the atrocious remake of The Hills Have Eyes. Did you catch those two plot twists? The signal that was so strong, just so happened to break away and drop to oblivion. Perhaps it was an accident that takes it out, because of course if someone has one of these great devices, they are going to immediately call the authorities right? Well in the film Funny Games, it just didn’t happen, and that’s unfortunate.

The death of cellular communication seems to be something that many people don’t really talk about until it happens in the movies of horror based characters. Think about this for a moment, it just so happens that this is an answered question in nearly all major movies, including the last few that I personally reviewed. Maybe the answer is not so much that it’s there, but that it’s used with care and featured with a certain amount of brevity for the audience to buy into. For instance, Scream utilizes this for a great deal of the film’s franchise and it doesn’t bother me. Then again, the signal was strong, so maybe that wasn’t a good example after all. I don’t know about you, but it’s going to bug me a lot, until movie makers stop using that crutch.