Trivia / Unfriended

• Dawson Casting: All of the teenage characters are played by actors in their twenties.
• No Budget: Made for a mere million dollars, with virtually all of the camerawork done with GoPro cameras mounted on laptops and watermark-free screen recording software.
• Ripped from the Headlines: Laura Barns' personality and death were heavily inspired by the real world cyber-bulling and suicides of Amanda Todd and Audrie Pott.
• The Producer Thinks of Everything: All of the main characters have real-life Facebook accounts. The video leading to Laura's suicide can also be actually viewed on YouTube...where it was, at one point, taken down for violating its guidelines on cyberbullying, even though it was staged!
• What Could Have Been:
  • An early draft actually had no supernatural elements, but featured Laura being avenged by a living person, with later rewrites featuring one of the six teenagers manipulating the events to avenge Laura. The plot element of a living person being behind everything was changed presumably to differentiate it from The Den.
  • A later draft also changed the viral video to Adam and Mitch date raping Laura, which in the final film was changed to Laura being roofied by Adam as a joke, which led to her defecating and excreting menstrual blood while unconscious. In the final picture Adam mentioned date raping someone during the "Never Have I Ever" game. Additionally, Laura defecating on her self was retained, but she wasn't drugged but passed out drunk.
  • Laura's suicide video was originally much closer to the real life deaths of her inspirations', but was changed because of the actress was scared of pretending to hang herself, as well as suicide by gunshot being easier to shoot. Furthermore, the crew actually shot several methods of Laura committing suicide before settling on the one featured. However, the original method was used in the German remake Friend Request.
  • Many of the death scenes in the movie are different from their first versions.
    • Ken's death itself stays the same, but between the Skype cut and the death, Blaire would have tried to contact him through his Facebook page, but Laura would have interfered with trolling.
    What's fat and red and white all over? Ken in a blender.
    • Adam would've been possessed, and led to walk on the road (the camera kept following him) until he got ran over by cars.
    • Jess would've been flung against the walls of her room until she died. The screen would have been blocked by her Facebook page, where the same happens to her avatar, with heavy doses of Painting the Medium (and of gore).
    • Blaire wouldn't have closed the laptop for a Jump Scare. Instead she'd scream one final time (the same scream at the end of the trailer, in fact) before the laptop hit a fatal error, frozen on her horrified face.
• Working Title: First Offline, then Cybernatural - the former was rejected for being too vague, the latter for being too on-the-nose.

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