Welcome to the Startup from Hell—Literally
Some horror movies make you scream because they’re terrifying. Others make you scream because you’ve wasted 90 minutes of your life. #Screamers (2016) lands squarely in the second category. Directed by Dean Matthew Ronalds, this film attempts to blend found-footage horror with startup culture, and the result is a movie that’s scarier for entrepreneurs than for audiences.
It’s a “self-made documentary” about an internet video company called Gigaler—a name that sounds like a rejected social app for golden retrievers. The movie’s supposed to explore viral culture, digital paranoia, and online horror, but mostly it explores how long you can stare at a loading screen before begging for death.
The Premise: What If The Blair Witch Project Was Funded by LinkedIn?
Gigaler is an up-and-coming video-sharing platform developing an algorithm to show users the content they’ll “really want.” (In this case, what we want is an escape route.) One day, the team receives an anonymously submitted “screamer” video—a clip of a girl walking through a cemetery before a masked man appears with a loud shriek.
It’s meant to be shocking, but it’s the kind of jump scare you’d find in a 2006 email chain titled “You’ll Never Believe What Happens Next!!!” The crew uploads it, it goes viral, and they all react like they’ve just discovered fire.
Then, because the plot needs to fill time, they get a second screamer video featuring the same girl—lying in bed, staring at the camera, and doing what the audience will soon be doing: nothing.
The Characters: Silicon Valley Meets Scooby-Doo
Our main players are Tom, Chris, Abbi, and Griffin, a crew of startup hopefuls who film everything as they try to track down the mystery girl in the videos. They’re not bad people—they’re just aggressively uninteresting.
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Tom (Tom Malloy): the CEO and self-proclaimed visionary, who alternates between “tech bro confidence” and “midlife crisis energy.”
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Chris (Chris Bannow): the filmmaker documenting everything, though his real gift lies in filming absolutely nothing happening.
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Abbi (Abbi Snee): the team’s researcher who discovers clues, like IP addresses and gravestones, that lead nowhere.
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Griffin (Griffin Matthews): the only one with personality, which means he’s doomed from the start.
Together, they’re the least dynamic group of investigators since the cast of Ghost Hunters: Corporate Edition. Their “banter” sounds improvised in the worst way—like actors who were told to sound natural but forgot what humans actually say.
The Investigation: CSI: Tech Support
After uploading the second video, the team realizes that the girl looks suspiciously like Tara Rogers, a missing woman from Rochester, New York. (Of course, instead of calling the police like normal people, they decide to handle it themselves.)
Using some advanced digital snooping—read: “Googling”—they find her address and set off on a road trip. You’d think this would be where the tension starts, but no. The first half of #Screamers is just endless footage of office chatter, conference calls, and shots of Tom staring at his laptop like he’s waiting for his student loans to vanish.
When they finally arrive in Rochester, things should get creepy. Instead, the film treats us to the kind of amateur ghost-hunting sequence that would make even the BuzzFeed Unsolved guys say, “We’re good, thanks.” They wander around a cemetery, discuss Jack the Ripper trivia, and take forever to knock on Tara’s door.
The pacing is so glacial that by the time anything remotely supernatural happens, you’re begging Francis Tumblety (the ghostly killer) to take you next.
Francis Tumblety: Jack the Ripper’s Bored Cousin
The movie’s supposed villain, Francis Tumblety, is a historical figure rumored to have been Jack the Ripper. Here, he’s reimagined as a masked ghost or possibly a reanimated startup investor—it’s never clear.
We barely see him. When we do, he’s either lurking in the background like a confused wedding photographer or popping up for a cheap screamer gag. He’s less a character and more a Wi-Fi signal—he appears briefly, ruins everything, and disappears again.
The scariest thing about Francis is how little we learn about him. What’s his motivation? His powers? His endgame? Apparently, just making people vanish and uploading new scream videos. He’s basically a supernatural content creator.
Found Footage: The Genre That Just Won’t Die (Unlike the Cast)
Found-footage horror can be great when done well—Paranormal Activity, Cloverfield, Host—but #Screamers feels like the version filmed by people who forgot to hit “record” half the time.
The editing is chaotic, jumping between shaky camera work, fake interviews, and inexplicable slow pans of office equipment. It’s supposed to feel immersive, but it just feels like watching a corporate training video for ghost hunters.
Even the jump scares, the genre’s bread and butter, are laughably weak. Every screamer moment is telegraphed so far in advance that you could check your phone, get a snack, and still not miss it.
The Horror: More Startup Drama Than Supernatural Terror
The first 70% of #Screamers is just the Gigaler crew debating marketing strategy. If the Devil himself had appeared in a puff of smoke, he would’ve looked around, sighed, and said, “Call me when something happens.”
When the horror does kick in, it’s confusing and anticlimactic. People vanish without explanation, others get jump-scared into oblivion, and there’s a twist ending involving Abbi that’s supposed to be chilling but mostly feels like a bad TikTok filter.
Even the final “scream” video—where Abbi walks through the cemetery and becomes the next victim—isn’t frightening. It’s like a YouTube short titled “Haunted Girl Prank (Gone Wrong)” that somehow forgot the “gone wrong” part.
Acting: Fear of Commitment
The cast tries, bless them, but they’re let down by the script’s lack of direction. Everyone spends most of the film staring at computer screens, pretending to be scared of buffering symbols. Tom Malloy gives the impression of a man haunted not by ghosts, but by poor Wi-Fi. Abbi Snee brings occasional spark, but she’s stuck explaining things the audience figured out twenty minutes ago.
It’s like watching a group of people rehearse a play they all secretly hate.
The Message: Technology Is Evil (Also, So Is Boredom)
If there’s a moral buried somewhere beneath the endless exposition, it’s that the internet is bad and algorithms will doom us all. But that’s hardly a revelation in 2016, or now. The film acts like it’s discovered something profound—“What if your favorite viral video… was cursed?”—but The Ring already did that, and with far more style.
Here, the only thing cursed is the pacing.
The Ending: Hashtag Anticlimax
By the time the final credits roll, everyone’s either dead, missing, or a ghost influencer. The movie ends not with a bang, but with another “screamer” clip—because nothing says originality like reusing your opening scare as your finale.
You’re left with more questions than fear, like:
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Who exactly was Francis Tumblety?
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Why does he love uploading videos?
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And how did this script make it past a first draft?
The film offers no answers, just another loud shriek and a fade to black. It’s as if the director literally screamed, “We’re out of money!” and hit stop.
Final Thoughts: #Yawners
#Screamers wants to be a clever, tech-savvy ghost story for the digital age. Instead, it’s a half-baked YouTube playlist disguised as a movie. It’s too slow to thrill, too confused to intrigue, and too self-serious to be campy fun.
If you’re looking for chills, you’ll find more on your phone’s low-battery warning than in this film.
Verdict:
⭐️½ out of 5.
A startup horror flick so uninspired, even Satan would swipe left.
