Here’s one I did last year when I was looking to justify a subscription to Starz. I started off on the B grade horror movie Friend Request, but ended up telling one of those stranger than fiction stories from my college days. Danny added some cool sound effects at the beginning and end. I recommend you listen, but you can scroll to read instead.

It’s Sunday again, and I’m still giving myself the challenge of finding things to watch on Starz. And I will admit that I have a sort of a fixation with movies about ghosts haunting you on the internet because of the masterpiece that is Kairo, or Pulse, that came out in Japan in the early 2000s.

So that is why I got stuck with watching Friend Request tonight. Everybody else had seen this movie but me, I guess. Looking it up, I even thought that the villain’s name, Marina Netafar, was some kind of anagram, and I looked that up, and everybody was way ahead of me. Yes, her last name was a friend or an friend or something. An hero.

I read somewhere that she learned about witchcraft on 4chan, as you can see when the requisite computer hacker of the movie is looking to figure out how this ghost is haunting everyone on the internet.

So this lonely girl, she fixates on this popular girl at college, and she decides to start sending her a whole bunch of stuff and tagging her. And the girl is trying to be nice, and the lonely girl invites herself to the popular girl’s birthday party, but she says, “I’m not having a birthday party.”

But that’s not true, and they post all the pictures online, and they have a big confrontation in the lunchroom at school. And then the lonely girl kills herself on Facebook Live, and then somehow possesses all the computers and makes everyone that this girl she has targeted, everyone that she knows, kill themselves.

And apparently everybody that was in this movie is famous for being in things that I haven’t seen. I had never heard of any of them. I’m going to have to look through their filmographies for some other better stuff.

I will say, I got to say something good about this. If you want to mess with people, put big old bugs in your movie. Now, a much better use of this—I, this movie had people being stung to death by wasps, which is a, you know, a booger bear.

That movie, the best use of that was in Prince of Darkness, when the guy said, “I’ve got a message for you, and you’re not going to like it.” And then ants ate him.

Once we got our house pressure washed, and the guy spent too much time on the shutters, and ants came in the house, and I had to call an exterminator. And while I was killing ants for days waiting on the exterminator to come, my husband looked at me and said, “I’ve got a message for you, and you’re not going to like it.”

And I just burst into tears because I thought that ants were going to eat us. Probably not. I don’t know what to say about this.

Bullying in college is a strange subject. I thought that people were grown up when they went to college and didn’t bother bullying each other anymore because they had better things to do.

And then I took a French class my sophomore year, and the teacher said that I had a good accent when I was speaking French, which is ridiculous. And this girl behind me did not like that and started going “na na na na na na na” every time that I said anything and using a really ridiculous accent herself when she had to say anything in French.

And I just completely ignored her. Like, I didn’t react at all. But because I couldn’t believe, like, that this was happening, that she was about 20 years old and acting like she was nine.

And I went to the professor, and he was like, “She is jealous of your accent.”

I was like, “Nous somme dans South Georgia.” And vous etes fou. I don’t know.

But the funniest part, the best part, is the ending.

She had these two henchmen that sat in class and giggled every time that she went at me. And they were all in the same sorority. So they came sneaking up to me at the end of the quarter, the two henchmen, and said, “Uh, will you tutor us for the final?”

And I said, “What about your friend?”

And they said, “Um, she’s our sorority sister and we have to like her.”

And I was like, “Okay.”

And, you know, thinking I’m going to get pig’s blood poured on me or something. But they actually came to my apartment and we sat and I tutored them and showed them how to use flashcards.

And I never saw any of those people again.

And that’s a true story.

And that’s what I have to say about Friend Request. I liked Unfriended better.

And have a good night.