Curiosity: Space and Time Lose Their Form in This Modern-day Horror

Michael Cooke’s 12-minute Curiosity is a compounded horror of our times, switching out found footage with streaming for a horrific display not distanced by time and barely even by space. A story set in and around the dark web, it features a man who falls prey not to his curiosity but to the morbid tastes for spectacle of others. 

Right off the bat, it uses a mirror to create and dismantle the illusion of space within Kevin’s (Hunter Bishop) cramped room. In fact, everything here points to a terminally online man whose view of the world begins and ends with the screen. When social media piques his interest about the dark web, he promptly—though with the familiar deadpan casualness with which any of us look up (and at) anything these—finds his way to it. 

The peculiarities of this dark wonderland is grotesque in the crudest, most disturbing sense of the word—the film evokes the history and expectations associated with found footage horror by presenting it in green lighting with the camera placement of CCTV. Kevin reacts appropriately. Seeing a man in a mask (John Cooke) auction off the body parts of a still alive man (Michael Cooke) as meat cuts, he types out furious, shocked comments: the display of a moral sense somehow feels like a marvel in a story landscape marked by debasement and unnaturalness. Indeed, Kevin’s carefully curated refuge-cave begins to collapse and introduces the natural world—but in a bitter inverse, only insofar as it is an extension of the digital world. The editing keeps a snappy pace punctuated by flickering blackouts. 

The actual climax moves with the cold inevitability of a slaughter after a chilling encounter of the two worlds brought together by Kevin’s computer screen. To the film’s credit, there are no jump scares. None are necessary when some of our worst contemporary fears are curdled into this Saw-esque body horror. 

And so Curiosity uses time-tested devices in an updated garb. Watch to be reminded: our devices are no longer our friends (if they ever were).