Friend Request

Friend Request is a German horror film directed by Simon Verhoeven (no relation to Dutch filmmaker Paul Verhoeven). The film has already made close to $7M in other countries having been released at the beginning of 2016. It stars Alycia Debnam-Carey, William Moseley, Connor Paolo, Brit Morgan, Brooke Markham, Sean Marquette, and Liesl Ahlers.

Popular college student Laura shares everything with her more than 800 Facebook friends. One day she accepts a friend request from classmate Marina, an awkward outcast. But when Laura excludes the hoodie-clad loner from her birthday party, she makes the mistake of posting pictures of the happy gathering. Outraged by the snub, and then devastated when Laura unfriends her, Marina kills herself, unleashing evil forces that commandeer Laura’s Facebook page and post a video of Marina’s gruesome suicide. Soon, one by one, Laura’s classmates fall prey to demonic forces that include homicidal swarms of wasps. Laura’s Facebook page is mysteriously hacked and begins displaying videos of each of her friends’ horrific deaths, triggering a drop in Laura’s social media followers and turning her into a campus pariah.

Verhoeven came up with the idea for Friend Request from an obvious place: Facebook. “It was a few weeks after one of my friends died,” he says. “I got a new message and started thinking it would be pretty freaky if this message were from my dead friend. All of a sudden I got goosebumps and thought ‘Okay, this is a topic for a horror film.’”

Friend Request is rated 14A.