Production began on Michael Costanza’s found footage horror in 2000, in the immediate wake of the global success of The Blair Witch Project (1999) but it took a couple of years for it to start surfacing, appropriately enough online at first before starting to make the rounds of the genre festivals. Though it barely made a splash at the time, it can now be seen as the fore-runner of the better known, more widely seen and not-as-good Unfriended (2014) and its sequel Unfriended: Dark Web (2018). Whereas the later films were full of annoying characters in clichéd situations, The Collingswood Story is an effective and frequently downright chilling no-budgeter presented entirely as though we were eavesdropping on a series of webcam internet telephone calls.

The set-up is slow and deceptive – Rebecca (Stephanie Dees) has left home to go to university in the town of Collingswood, New Jersey and to help them keep in touch her boyfriend John (Johnny Burton) has set her up with a webcam and some net-phone software. It’s Rebecca’s birthday and John sets her up with some bonkers phone cam “freaks” to keep her entertained, including the online psychic Vera Madeline (Diane Behrens) who warns the couple that Rebecca’s new home town was the site of a series of brutal cult-related murders, one of which took place in her new house. As the film progresses, Rebecca sets up her laptop with an extra-long phone lead so she can keep John with her as she explores the house – but when she starts poking around in the attic they both get a lot more than they bargained for.

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The Collingswood Story was notable at the time for its use of webcam technology, long before it became an online commonplace. It would be easy now to snort derisively at the primitive software and hardware (today wi-fi would have made it a much shorter story…) but that’s to miss the point of the film. Nothing dates a film as quickly as its technology and it’s shame that the film today would lose some of its impact, particularly among younger viewers, as some of the developments are rather quaint looking (the need for Rebecca to run a long telephone cable up to the attic being the most obvious). One also has to question John’s motivation in handing out Rebecca’s phone number to various unknown to him members of the online web phone community – privacy and ethical concerns were very different in the noughties than they are today…

But The Collingswood Story works nonetheless, by virtue of being a very simple concept, pulled off by writer/director Costanza remarkably well. He takes care to ensure that we actually get to know and like Rebecca and John before he plunges them into their nightmare, ensuring that our discomfort in the film’s closing minutes is all the more difficult to endure. The performances of the two leads, Dees and Burton, are so natural and unaffected that it almost becomes uncomfortable eavesdropping on their conversations like this and their final fates are all the more distressing for our emotional investment in them.

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The Collingswood Story isn’t a film for those in a hurry – it takes a long time for the horror to emerge which makes the film all the creepier, especially on a second viewing when the hilarious parade of weirdos that Rebecca and John meet online assume more sinister overtones (could they be part of the cult?). Costanza wants you to get to know this couple before he springs his surprisingly nasty and effective finale and while the deliberately slow-moving pace will alienate many, those who stay the course will be rewarded with one of the creepiest final acts that the found footage film has yet produced.

The horrors associated with the darker side of the internet and the many ways people now access and use it have long been a staple of horror cinema (Halloween: Resurrection (2002), Pulse (2006), The Den (2013), Ratter (2015), Friend Request (2016)) but The Collingswood Story beat them all to the punch. Its technology has aged poorly but it remains an impressive and above all else genuinely unsettling film with characters we can care about and an intriguing back story.