New social media horror movie XOXO will be directed by George Nolfi

Every once in a while, a new project comes along that makes you go "Hmmmmmm." Like a horror movie in which the method of terror is social media. Good news! Such a movie is now in the works! George Nolfi, who wrote and directed The Adjustment Bureau, is on board to direct XOXO, and he'll be supervising the screenplay by Mark Heyman, who co-wrote Black Swan.

Billed as "Fatal Attraction for the digital age," XOXO will follow "an engaged executive who begins a virtual relationship with a mysterious woman on Facebook," whose interactions in real life turn deadly. It obviously won't be the first movie to turn social media into a monster (see: Catfish and Hard Candy), but when you think about how effectively Scream made us jump every time the phone rang late at night, I feel like we're ready for a straight-up horror movie that will elicit the same reactions when we get a Facebook notification. (Maybe we'll spend that much less time on Facebook when we could be doing something productive.)

I think on some level, we all think social media is a little scary. Suddenly, we live in a time when people, strangers, can see and read nearly everything we're doing, because we're (oddly) trusting enough to put it all out there voluntarily. And sometimes, horrible things happen as a result of being a little too trusting. To say nothing of the paranoia, mind games, and mixed messages involved with such a passive-agressive and often anonymous form of communication. So actually, social media is a perfect part of current pop culture to turn into a psychological thriller! And that's what XOXO is going to be.

‘Adjustment Bureau’ director George Nolfi takes social media thriller ‘XOXO’ [Screen Rant]

Image from ViralBlog

• [Chentzilla]

  XOXO? How do you even read this? I first thought “Like” was a name, and now think it’s a better one.

  Also, I’d watch a horror movie based on deviantART.
  http://jirinovsky.deviantart.com/

  • [WhyBother]

    My first thought was “zo zo”. Then I tride to imagine the movie trailer guy saying, and I realized it’ll probably just be “ex oh, ex oh”.

    • [Chentzilla]

      Bonus points if you didn’t laugh aloud after that.

• [Boundegar]

  Haven’t the Japanese already done this?

  • [Chentzilla]

    Haven’t it ever stopped Americans?

• [EH]

  976-EVIL

  • [WhyBother]

    Or Fear dot com. For every movie like Psycho that makes you nervous to get in the shower, there’re thirty that make you cringe at how anyone managed to take the plot seriously.

• [regnad_kcin]

  I thought xoxo was some kinda festival

• [Rich Keller]

  I finally watched Adjustment Bureau on DVD a couple of nights ago after watching Four Lions.

  Are they going to do a scary augmented reality game that sends you  menacing texts as a marketing thing?

• [spocko]

  Well a great tv episode was written about this. It’s called Black Mirror and Channel 4 out of the UK broadcast it on December 2011.

  The episode is about how someone uses social media to force a politician to do unspeakable acts to save a girl’s life. It explores how social media can be used as a weapon.

  There are 3 episodes in the series, each does a take on the future of social media, Facebook and privacy issues, American Idol like voting someone “up” or “off the island” and the use of twitter, and YouTube to terrorize a politician.
  You can watch it on the Channel 4 site.
  The best Horror/SF series I watched all year

• [Gilbert Wham]

   ^^^ Done by Charlie Brooker, who also did ‘Dead Set’ (Big Brother W/Zombies), and used to write scathing PC Games reviews. Also, he writes one of the few tolerable columns in the Guardian.

  • [EH]

    The “reply” link is over there.

• [Pedantic Douchebag]

  I’ll take Movie Pitches That Might Have Been Slightly Relevant Three Years Ago for $500, Alex!

• [Craig Forshaw]

  So… much like most sci-fi movies and shows are increasingly anti-sci-fi (and about the dangers of playing God! e.g. the ‘Battlestar Galactica’ reboot, and its ludicrous, “Send the ships into the sun, angels will protect us,” twaddle), and horror movies are about how great Jesus is (how many movies about demons and possession have their been recently?), we now have another film with a largely fear-based, right-wing agenda – all the internets is out to get us, lolz!

  Pass. 

  • [Frederik]

    You’re reading way too much into those movies. Christianity in horror and sci fi isn’t about converting you to the faith, it’s about using existing myths to create a nice framework for storytelling.

    As a non religouse person I see Christianity as one of the best fantasy universes ever created. It’s got everything; angels, demons, magic, ancient rituals and plenty of room for conspiracies. It makes for great stories, nothing more.
    Same with horror about media and technology, it’s not meant to make you fear the internet. It’s having some fun with things that are a part of everyday life.

• [PKMousie]

  You’ve blocked me on Facebook, now you’re going to die!

  http://soundcloud.com/knifepartyinc/knife-party-internet-friends

• [sata blank]

  Does anyone remember that movie Strangeland that Dee Snider wrote and starred in ? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0124102/  I think it might have been the first movie I had seen using the “omg the internet is full of strangers who will murder you” plot.
  It was also amazingly bad, but I can’t remember if it was good bad or just awful.

• [Steve Calvert]

  I  can’t say that I have any real desire to see the film, I think it would bore me to tears, but I love the picture that you used in your post :)