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Screenlife: Zoom Origins

Screenlife: Zoom Origins

Last updated on: September 12, 2026 at 12:40 pm by Chase Padusniak

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Screenlife: Zoom Origins 2026-09-12T12:40:24-04:00 Chase Padusniak

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Through the Night #1
Source: Deviant Art user mistahjackson90
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Lately, I’ve been getting a kick out of revisiting early internet movies. I don’t mean 90s hacker stuff that rarely had anything to do with the online world. Those were power fantasies about a knowing few. I have in mind films like Unfriended (2014), screenlife joints that try to capture the increasingly normal nature of being online in the early 2010s. These often try to be formally experimental (and fail miserably).

Like the recent catastrophic remake of War of the Worlds (2025), they offer glimpses into otherwise private human lives mediated by new devices (webcams, phone cameras). Because of when they were made, a good chunk of them ape the feel of found footage films, then enjoying a renaissance in the wake of Paranormal Activity (2007) and its sequels. Fundamentally, they are attempts to reckon with how the internet seemed to be changing us—more surveilled, more neurotic, less truly connected.

Most are bad—quite bad. Most cost a stick of gum and an external hard drive to make. Their narratives are ham-fisted and contrived (why is that character’s webcam on again?). But I feel compelled to revisit them because they were fundamentally correct: we have only started taping ourselves more; we’ve only become less private; and our brains have only become more like the egg in the frying pan. In essence, these stand in the long and crooked line of cinema history as experiments with and in a new kind of humanity. They offer a glimpse into cheapo self-exploration of a people on the edge of something no one quite understood. Your dad’s brain hadn’t been cooked by AI babies in prom dresses, and your students didn’t yet ask Chat for the product of two and two. Something slouched forth. We just weren’t quite sure what yet.

There’s also probably something ambivalently nostalgic at play. The early 2010s, for better or worse, is when I came of age. It’s the time of now-naïve memes, early culture war, and “bipartisanship.” I once heard it (specifically 2015) called “the last happy year in our lives.” I wouldn’t say that; I’m not particularly nostalgic for late-era Obama. But I understand the point: that the world did feel simpler prior to Trump and after Bush. A simpler and easier version of the end of history still reigned, one I’m sure many heard in 25th anniversary commemorations of 9/11 yesterday.

My proposal, then, is to write a few reviews of these kinds of movies in particular. Mostly screenlife films, though I’m up for anything that scratches the temporal itch. I haven’t read much about them, though perhaps I will. I have no idea if I’ll come to any kind of conclusion.

I’m going in blind (much like the late 2010s did). Away we go.

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