Killer Technology: 20 Techie Thrillers

That chainsaw-wielding sociopathic maniac slicing and dicing everyone he comes into contact with just ain't scary enough for today's blood-thirsty horror movie-going public.



Yeah, they still want the gore, but movies are relying more on technology to deliver the splatter and suspense. These days, killers track their pray with emails, video conferencing, computers and a host of other gadgets and gizmos. In some instances, the technology itself is the killer.



With Halloween just around the corner, ChannelWeb has rounded up 20 chilling silver screen tales where technology plays a role, be it major or minor. What you see might make you think twice before answering your cell phone or responding to that instant message. Don't worry, we won't spoil the endings. Hold your breath, it's about to get scary, and maybe even a little bit nerdy.



GPS



Navigation systems never hurt as good as they do in GPS, a 2007 thriller that chronicles a group of college buddies partaking in a GPS treasure hunt in search of money. Unfortunately for them, instead of buried treasure, their navigation system leads them to a buried coffin chock full of photos of a kidnapped woman and GPS coordinates that will lead them to even darker places. It's up to the crew to decide whether the photos are real or part of a modern-day cat and mouse game where consumer technology dictates their every turn.

The 2006 remake of this 1979 chiller flips the script and makes the technological centerpiece a cellular phone as opposed to an old rotary dial telephone, but the plot stays relatively true to form. You know the story, young Jill is stuck babysitting in a big scary house by herself as punishment for exceeding her cell phone minutes. The phone rings, and it's a stranger on the line. When Jill decides to trace the call, she realizes…wait for it…that it's coming from inside the house!



Can Jill rustle up the children and get out in time? Will she live or die? Does the psycho even care that he's running up Jill's cell phone minutes, the exact thing that got her in this predicament in the first place?

Keeping the creepy cell phone theme, 2008's One Missed Call takes it one step further by making the cell phone the actual killer, sort of.



When a group of people start receiving chilling cell phone messages, which foreshadow the sounds of their own death, kids start dropping like flies. The calls comes in, plays the horrific din, and a few days later the victims die in the same way the message foretold. And when a girl thinks she's cracked the phenomenon, the cops think she's nuts.

Regardless, she becomes bent on unraveling the mystery behind the ominous and deadly calls.

What do you do when wireless comes for you? In Pulse, the 2006 Kristin Bell-led flick, a hacker invades the computer of an engineer designing a powerful new wireless signal. What the hacker doesn't realize is his actions accidentally release a mysterious force that take away a human's will to live, creating a suicide epidemic of Soilent Green proportions.

The sinister Wi-Fi signal seems to grow stronger as more and more victims off themselves as a group of techies plan to deploy a virus developed by the original hacker to shut down the system and ultimately save the world from mass suicide.

This one is kind of cheating, since the movie is based on a video game, but the use of a supercomputer in this 2002 Milla Jovovich vehicle make it any techies dream, or nightmare, if you will. When a virus escapes from a secret bio-engineering facility called "The Hive," the staff is reduced to blood-thirsty zombies and the animals they were studying become flesh-craving beasts. The base is shut down and sealed off by Red Queen, the facility's governing supercomputer.



But a team of super commandos, led by scantily clad Alice (Jovovich) must shut down the computer and penetrate the virus before it wipes out mankind.

Parents have been saying that video games are evil for a long time. Stay Alive takes killer graphics to a whole new level. In this 2006 Sci Fi thriller, Malcolm In The Middle star Frankie Muniz and his pals find that the answer to the mysterious and brutal deaths of their friends lie within a new video game called Stay Alive.



The game centers on the story of a 17th century serial killer noblewoman known as the Blood Countess. When kids play, they end up dying in real life in the same method through which they died in the game. From there, the line between the game and reality blurs as a group tries to defeat the malicious countess while trying not to let the game kill them too.

Computers were even killers in the 1970s, evidenced by Demon Seed, a 1977 thriller in which scientist Alex Harris, while doing research on artificial intelligence, creates a super computer dubbed the Proteus IV.



The computer grows extremely powerful, eventually having a mind of its own and going against orders. The good scientist quickly shuts down all of the Proteus terminals, but forgets about the one in his estranged wife Susan's home. The evil machine takes over, imprisons Susan and impregnates her, forcing her to give birth to its "Demon Seed."

As bodies start piling up in New York City, it's realized that all of them died 48 hours after logging onto a Web site called Fear.com. This techno flick follows investigators as they try to solve and research these gory deaths, only to find out that in order to stop it they have to log on to the site themselves.

While Jon Bon Jovi's acting in this 2005 flick may be scarier than the actual plot, Cry Wolf takes online lies to a new low. When a townie winds up dead, a group of snotty prep schoolers start the nasty game of writing mass emails about a killer called "The Wolf" who goes from school to school spilling the blood of the innocents.



Problem is, the lies start to come true and one by one everything mentioned in the email actually happens, leaving an entire town and its prep school inhabitants living on a prayer.

Sometimes the dead are better left undisturbed. 2005's White Noise, starring Michael Keaton, finds Jonathan Rivers (Keaton) grieving over the death of his wife. When Rivers reaches the brink, he's approached by a paranormal expert that gives him the ability to hear his wife from beyond the grave, through EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomenon).



But while trying to contact his wife, Rivers opens up a Pandora's box of supernatural messages from those not of this world who won't stand for Rivers' meddling.

Leave it to Stephen King to make cell phones the root of all evil. In Cell, King's in production novel-turned-movie (expected in 2009), the author spins a dark tale of what happens when technology goes wrong. In this case, a pulse is sent out through cell phones around the world turning users into deranged, zombiefied killing machines.

Imagine if every cell phone, radio and television started broadcasting the same signal over and over. Then, imagine that the transmissions turn people into violent, uncontrollable psychopaths.



The Signal, 2007, explores that notion. The mysterious signal emanating from every device and network invades the minds of everyday citizens in the town of Terminus compelling them to kill or be killed.

Scream, the 1996 jump-out-of-your-seat thriller that made horror movies cool again, may not focus solely on technology. But the psycho killer bent on terrorizing a group of high school students utilizes cell phones, walkie talkies and even a voice distortion device to torment his potential victims.



The first in a long line of horror movies about horror movies, Scream is seen as the pinnacle of what can happen when a maniac gets a hold of technology.

Not a horror movie in the classic sense, 2004's Cellular, starring Kim Basinger, is a psychological thriller that illustrates how important technology, in this case a cell phone, has become. The flick follows a kidnapped woman locked in a room with nothing but a smashed cell phone.



After making a few tweaks to fix the busted device, the captive woman makes contact with a young man, who after some convincing, agrees to help save her.

What happens when video games turn real? Evolver, 1995, poses that question. When a popular virtual reality video game comes to life, a young man must battle the robot version of the popular arcade game.



Problem is, the robot is programmed to win at all costs, sparking a struggle for survival. Beating the game means the difference between life and death.

Phone, a 2002 South Korean thriller, may make you think twice before changing your cell phone number. When Ji-won gets a new cell phone, a friend's daughter, Young-Su, answers a call and screams in terror. Young-Su is never the same again.



Meanwhile, other mysterious happenings occur, all centered around the cell phone, sparking an investigation that uncovers that nearly everyone who had the same phone number before Ji-won died under unusual circumstances.

When a sleazy cable TV operator finds a snuff film called "Videodrome," he is bent on airing it. Come to find, however, that TV screens are the retina of the mind's eye and "Videodrome" transmissions create a brain tumor in viewers, changing their reality through hallucinations.

Maybe not the most high tech of all thrillers, 2002's The Ring shows what can happen when technology goes bad. In this case, death comes after watching a disturbing video. After someone watches the video, the phone rings, telling the viewer they will die in one week.



Exactly a week to the day, the viewer dies of fright. It's up to a journalist, played by Naomi Watts, to investigate the cause of the mysterious deaths and the origin of the killer tape, but to get to the bottom of it, she may have to watch the tape herself.

Saw's Jigsaw, a masked psychopathic killer who offers his victims the choice of life or death, often with disfiguring consequences, uses technology at every turn.



Whether it's building classic torture devices set to timers that kill his victims if they don't complete a certain task, or the crude video conferencing system and surveillance equipment he uses to communicate with and keep an eye on his captives, Jigsaw uses a host of modern technology to perform his evil deeds.

In Computer Killers, also known as Horror Hospital, Dr. Storm plans to take over the world. He coaxes his victims by offering a rehab of sorts, claiming he can help them kick their habits and rid themselves of hang-ups in just a week's time.



But when a seventies rock musician decides he needs time to unwind and calls on Storm, he finds Storm is using a super-computer to turn his patients into zombies that are completely under his control.