“FeardotCom” Dials Up Sensational Digital Terror [Rotten Outlook]

I was nearly scared to death the first time I watched director William Malone’s FeardotCom. I was in second grade, and to commemorate my brothers and me getting Pokémon Sapphire for the Game Boy Advance, my mom allowed us to have a quasi-sleepover in the basement. It was a night of catching ‘mons and watching movies on the basement television we otherwise might have been barred from seeing. I settled on FeardotCom, not knowing what it was. I saw a bloodied body, Stephen Dorff, and said, “Yes, this is for me.” Then, the first ghost appeared. I threw my Game Boy, ran upstairs, and never finished the movie until years later.

In a lot of ways (most ways), FeardotCom is not a good movie. No surprise, given its staggeringly low 3% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. One of the first titles to receive an infamous F Cinemascore, FeardotCom bombed at the box office. It grossed $18 million worldwide against a budget upwards of $40 million. Horror is intrinsically immune to the vagaries of the market. When in doubt, horror it out. Horror movies make bank, move audiences, and remain inimitably successful at the box office, market fluctuations be damned. That wasn’t enough for FeardotCom, a cybertech, Y2K horror thriller so grimy and convoluted, it alienated what should have been a guaranteed audience.

Stephen Dorff and Natascha McElhone star as Mike Reilly and Terry Huston, an NYPD officer and Department of Health researcher respectively. Bodies are cropping up over New York City (with Luxembourg serving as a poor stand-in), and the two team up to track down the sinister forces at play. Those sinister forces are Feardotcom.com (yes, really). A voyeuristic snuff site on the dark web, Feardotcom(.com) depicts all manner of torture, murder, and abuse. Visitors die after visiting the site, suffering visions and auditory hallucinations. Some fall from windows, others crash their cars, though all die horrifically.

The MPA rated FeardotCom NC-17 rating for its graphic violence upon release. Malone and the studio successfully cut the movie down to a more palatable, though still violent, R-rating. An unqualified failure, FeatdotCom still managed to find an audience. The late Roger Ebert, for his part, remarked, “Strange, how good “FeardotCom” is, and how bad. The screenplay is a mess, and yet the visuals are so creative this is one of the rare bad films you might actually want to see.” Bad Dreams can shove it. Feardotcom was where it was at.

Ebert, in truth, isn’t entirely wrong. FeardotCom does work, audiences just need to know where to look. As an augur for the forthcoming “torture porn” wave, FeardotCom was ahead of its time. Whether “torture porn” is an adequate qualifier for the wave of genre cinema in the early aughts that pushed boundaries with transgressive uber-violence, there’s no denying FeardotCom was one of the first to log in. The titular site, revealed to be created by the ghost of a serial killer’s first victim, is abounding with all manner of grimy, jittery violence. There’s quotidian torture, people bound and gagged, scalpels over bare flesh—all that torturous jazz.

The cyber thrills, too, were right at home post-millennium. While the likes of Pulse or The Cell played with digital scares more successfully, FeardotCom viciously carved out a niche of its own. While those movies, in part, restrained themselves, endeavoring to accomplish more than cheap thrills, FeatdotCom revels in the muck. It’s an ugly movie that looks really good. There’s little to its conceit or thrills. Largely, it’s violence for violence’s sake. Digital ghosties appear for brief scares. Bugs crawl in and out of orifices. New York by way of Luxembourg has apparently never seen the sun before.

In retrospect, FeardotCom has likely made up its box office deficit given the frequency with which it’s syndicated on cable networks. It’s akin to Law & Order, a property a few decades old that incredulously seems to always be on. In fact, it might as well be Law & Order: Ghost Edition, only with considerably less procedural grace and ten times more splattery fun. In a lot of ways, fun is perhaps the best qualifier. FeardotCom isn’t strictly speaking good, but it is technically sound, a worthwhile window in horror’s tenuous foothold at the start of the century.

Horror was shifting, expanding its international net, balancing digital and analog scares. The genre writ large was responding to different horrors, both real and perceived. The world was unsteady, abounding with tragedy and terror. As a meta-exercise, FeatdotCom was onto something. In unsteady times, there was something empowering in watching digitally rendered horror. No different than visiting the titular site itself, checking into FeardotCom is oddly cathartic. It’s a bonafide early aughts gem, a movie whose frayed edges, two decades later, render it better than upon release.