The Den: Being a Woman Online is the Literal Worst

If watching a feature-length horror movie version of an episode of Black Mirror and deleting your Chatroulette account is a thing you want to spend your Saturday night alone doing, then Zachary Donahue’s 2014 film directorial debut The Den is right up your webstream. If you aren’t familiar with Black Mirror, it’s basically The Twilight Zone for making you hate yourself, your life, and modern technology. See also: Unfriended, but where the monsters are people instead of ghosts. Have we reached the pop culture referential comparison quota for this article? Great. The Den follows Bethany, a grad student conducting a study on the habits of Internet-users via a Chatroulette/Skype hybrid known as The Den. Gratuitous dick-waggling, creepy masturbators, and the occasional death prank ensue. But then she comes across a murder that seems a bit too real, and things in her own life begin to unravel. First, her academic career is ruined. Then, her friends and family begin to disappear mysteriously.

If you’re familiar with Unfriended, The Den is Unfriended before Unfriended was a thing. The Den takes the form of found footage shot primarily through Bethany’s screen recording device, installed for her study. Unlike Unfriended, which I’ve typed so many times now that it doesn’t seem like a real word anymore, The Den also splices in some cell phone FaceTime shots and security camera footage, which doesn’t necessarily detract from the film so much as it feels like a bit of a cheat from a found footage perspective. But maybe I’m a purist (hint: I am, I’m the worst). To be fair, Unfriended is also shot in real time, with all of the events taking place over the course of a few hours, while The Den takes a few days to a week for everything to transpire. Comparisons and groundbreaking-ness aside, The Den is a really solid horror-slasher. It’s well-paced, well-written, and well-acted. It also contains some really interesting social commentary on anonymity’s tendency to bring out the worst in humanity, specifically men.

Strap in, kids, because today I’m gonna get academically feminist on ya. There’s a phenomenon in society known as “toxic masculinity,” which is basically the ways in which gender roles are harmful to men insofar as social expectation demands men be strong, emotionless, sex-and-violence robots. Wanna watch some romantic comedies, cry and sip sangria? TOO BAD. Toxic masculinity says “ENOUGHA THAT SHIT. Time to man up and go shoot something.” Angry at feminism because men can’t wear dresses and makeup? WRONG. That’s the patriarchy’s fault for imposing toxic masculinity. A lot of things, such as mass-shootings, rape culture, and the fact that an overwhelming majority of serial killers are men, are attributed to the toxic masculinity phenomenon, and a lot of smarter people have said stuff about it way better than I ever could. My point is, the sociological thing that makes men responsible for 98% of forcible rapes in the U.S. is the same thing that makes them the majority of flashers, literal jerk-offs, and perpetrators of general harassment online.

So back to The Den. From here on out, spoilers abound. So keep reading, or don’t, but know that according to one weird study, you actually enjoy movies more if you know what is going to happen in them. Eventually, Bethany is kidnapped by the same group of masked freaks who murdered the girl she saw in the beginning of the film and set all the horrific events therein into motion. They have her Houdini’d boyfriend with them too! Except then he gets murdered pretty brutally, and Bethany has to watch.  Bethany makes for a pretty good Final Girl, taking down one of her captors with nothing but the chain attaching her ankle to a radiator, grabbing a weapon every time she comes across one (although I literally yelled at the screen when she used it to jam a door handle on a goddamned GLASS DOOR… but I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt and call that one a brainfart under extreme duress), and eventually even making it outside and into one of what we now know to be many murderous psychopath’s cars… And promptly gets plowed into by a truck.

Here comes the Black Mirror twist. Bethany is re-captured, hung by the neck, and eventually shot, which Bethany’s English friend from earlier witnesses, thus beginning the cycle all over again. Then the video stream ends. We’re back on the home screen of a website featuring hundreds of similar screencaps, all of women in varying levels of terror and brokenness. We pan out to see a man browsing. He wants to watch the next narrative. But the next narrative isn’t free. Luckily, the site takes major credit cards…

The thesis statement of this film is that literally everyone is the fucking worst (but men a little bit more). This is a pretty easy conclusion to reach for anyone who has spent any time in a comment section, googled the phrase “dark net”, or been to the Internet’s asshole (read: 4chan). But this extends to the real world for Bethany as well. As events transpire to slowly make Bethany’s life a living Hell, not only will the cops, her boyfriend, and her hacker friend Max not help, most of them don’t even believe there’s actually anything wrong. Every man that Bethany is supposed to trust and depend on lets her down.

Now, earlier we discussed toxic masculinity. I think this movie is a commentary on the ways in which the glorification of violence to men impacts their behavior without really knowing or setting out to be one. Moreover, I think the film had good intentions of making commentary on the true nature of humans when given the anonymity of the Internet, combined with the anarchic capitalism the Internet’s existence enables, and in doing so the film accidentally stepped right in hegemonic gender role stew. That the film’s protagonist is female is not an accident. The Internet simply is a way worse place for women. But the film’s critique isn’t quite pointed or specific enough to lead me to believe its gender commentaries are intentional. Then again, I am but a lowly analyst of horror who would be delighted to know your thoughts, dear reader. Either way, The Den was a pretty good thriller that will keep your heart racing and remind you in the worst way that all monsters are human.