Cam (2018)
Directed by Daniel Goldhaber
95 minutes
Alice Ackerman (Madeline Brewer), an ambitious rising star on the adult cam site where she performs under the moniker Lola\_Lola, makes a comfortable livelihood catering to the outré fantasies of her hordes of anonymous admirers, earning their love and loyalty with regular live streams of graphically provocative roleplay. When Alice discovers that she’s been locked out of her account—and that the person or entity responsible is continuing to post what appears to be real live-streamed footage of “Lola,” created without Alice’s involvement—she embarks on a desperate, dangerous bid to wrest back control of her carefully cultivated virtual persona from an unseen adversary. Director Daniel Goldhaber and screenwriter Isa Mazzei are back in the news with _Faces of Death_, their fictional reimagining of the same-named 1978 shocker, and Scary Movies XIV is proud to world-premiere a newly struck 35mm print of the duo’s first collaboration, which anticipates our present moment—marked as it is by the proliferation of deepfake technologies and deep-seated cultural anxieties around the slippery nature of online identity—with razor-sharp prescience. A Blumhouse release.