Here, an artifact only one layer of sediment away from Napster and Kazaa may mark one of your most unique and memorable watches.

The blanketing, spare Windows 95 scenes call to mind the other special effects that, cheap or undercooked, accidentally fit the movie better than the more expensive versions would have - think Jaws (1975) and the necessarily shadowed CGI T-rex in Jurassic Park (1993). Collingsworth‘s not scary, but it is eerily bare in a creepy, AOL way - just unsettling and believable enough to keep you dialed in for its lean runtime. Watching The Collingsworth Story is like reading Nostradamus: you’re not entirely sure whether what you’re seeing was a kind of conscious prediction, or just accident and entropy. Several phone calls to a psychic and one early internet-research scene later, our heroes find themselves tip-toeing through Wiccan symbols and dust only a few degrees shy of the dried mud aging the cabin at the end of The Blair Witch Project (1999).

Unrealistically clear video signals mark the small suspension of disbelief required to take the movie seriously on its own terms. 56k phone modems are their only connection. Hometown couple Rebecca and John are separated by an eight-hour drive - Rebecca at college, and John at the local body shop. Eighteen years before Host, an inexpensive little film called The Collingsworth Story (2002) plugged in a few webcams and built a small world. Find where this movie is currently streaming with JustWatch.

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