Technology Ruins Your Halloween Favorites
If you’ve ever watched an old movie and thought to yourself, man this could all be resolved in under two hours if only these characters had access to better technology, you’re not alone. In honor of October, I thought it would be fitting to break down some thrilling movies and shows you’re likely to rewatch this month and expose their plot holes from the lens of an avid technology user in 2024.
For example, let’s start with the hit series Stranger Things. Although season one debuted in 2016, the show takes place in the 1980s, meaning the technology in the show is limited to what was available at that time. This has a huge impact on the rollout of the story, and more importantly, the characters’ ability to communicate with each other throughout the series. While walkie-talkies allow the boys some ability to communicate, this only works if they’re within a certain distance of each other. When they get separated, no one knows what the other one is doing. It isn’t until later in the season usually that all the characters are able to get together and finally share all their findings with each other.
But imagine if they had a group chat, a way to share their discoveries in real time. Maybe poor Will Byers wouldn’t have had to go through all that and for so long if everyone just had a cellphone! In that case, maybe they wouldn’t have gone on to have 4 astonishingly successful seasons, breaking Netflix’s records for being the most streamed show of 2022 and one of the most streamed Netflix Originals of all time.
Now that I think about it, I wonder if you’d get service in the upside down…
Moving on to some real horror classics, let’s talk American Psycho. The story of Patrick Bateman, played scarily well by Christian Bale, follows a Wall Street executive on his journey to live out his depraved secret life of being a serial killer while maintaining a practical and poised appearance to the public in his regular life. He’s able to move unnoticed through a range of environments, whether it’s in the office at work or the bustling bars of New York City nightlife.
His plan of attack centers around luring his victim back to his apartment, where he puts on a record to drown out their screams, changes into his infamous clear raincoat and begins the bloody massacre within the confines of his apartment. Everything was calculated and meticulous just like his personal routine.
Unfortunately, the character of Patrick Bateman is not entirely based on fiction, and there exist men out there with similar ammo to Bateman, who lure women into their homes with intent to kill.
However, in today’s world, we have the power of social media to blast these violent characters and warn other women to stay clear of them. All it takes is one victim to escape and share their story online or a friend of the victim to take to social media to advocate for their killer to be brought to justice for the story to blow up and go viral on the internet. This could lead to a virtual manhunt in which people piece together a series of murders, searching for the key details to connect the cases and hopefully narrow down the search for the murderer.
While in the name of justice this is a powerful tool, it would not serve Patrick Bateman very well at all and would essentially lead to his demise. If someone were to post his photo with their horror story, it’s over for Bateman and the movie American Psycho would have a much shorter run time.
The Shining is a classic horror film with big names such as Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duval, and the perfect watch for the Halloween season. The story focuses on a family that moves into the Overlook Hotel, a creepy old hotel located in the snowy mountains of Colorado, where the father has agreed to look over the hotel while it’s closed for the winter. This soon begins their descent into madness as they experience what we now call cabin fever or going stir-crazy within the confines of the hotel with no way out other than riding a snowmobile through the harsh winter bringing multiple feet of snow.
You’ll have to watch the movie to see all the craziness that ensues in the Overlook Hotel, but the point of this article is to expose how and why technology ruins a movie as iconic and renowned as this. Imagine the family in The Shining but with subscriptions to Netflix, Hulu, Max, you name it, or maybe an Xbox with some games like GTA or Call of Duty ready to go.
If there’s one thing we learned from isolation during the pandemic, it is that many of us rely on media of all forms to keep ourselves both sane and entertained during what was referred to as “an unprecedented time”. I would argue that the family in The Shining may have made it through the winter if they had the luxury to binge-watch their favorite shows or spend hours on end racing one another in Mario Kart.
Obviously, we’d get a very different movie, but at least they’d cut back on the red rum (if you know you know 😉).
As much as we value and rely on technology today, to go back in time and insert today’s technological advancements into the past would reshape or redefine the classics we love. Some may even say it ruins them. Even if it saves the victims from a more traumatic ending, isn’t that what we’re watching horror films to see??
This Halloween, when you’re watching the scary movies on your list, take a moment and think about how today’s technology could completely uproot the plot, for better or worse.
Lastly,
Happy Halloween, TechBarbie readers!!