Very true. Get stranded on a deserted island and there’s no hope of making a call unless someone happens to have a working satellite phone, which is unlikely in most circumstances.
Do iPhones have normal chargers? I ask because something happened with Mr. Neville’s Mac laptop’s charger when we were in Australia a few years ago- the charger stopped working, or wouldn’t work with the plug adapters, or something. We had a really tough time finding a replacement for it. If iPhones have similarly unique chargers, something like this could easily happen.
If you’ve got a concrete floor, as you might find in parking garages, you’ve got a cell phone destroyer. I have confirmed this experimentally.
I can see a scene where someone tries to use a cell phone while being stalked by a supernatural killer, and either getting static as said earlier - or even better, static and creepy not-quite-understandable voices.
A survival horror video game called Silent Hill 2 had a pretty neat take on this: your character was stuck in an abandoned town full of strange, slow-moving critters who displayed a particularly adamant desire for a certain type of above-shoulder cuisine, if you get my drift.
In any event, your character finds a portable radio in the beginning of the game, and it begins to crackle with static whenever monsters are near you. The closer they get the more intense the static becomes, and since the fog is so damn thick you often find yourself blindly running about in an attempt to lose your pursuers, and the radio feedback serves as your only source of intelligence.
(alright, alright, I actually spent most of the early parts of the game actively tracking the [del]zombies[/del] monsters, that I might introduce them to the 2x4-shaped brand of justice that I so enthusiastically took to dispensing, but the important thing is that most reasonable horror movie participants would take the crackling as a cue to run.)
Hello? Cell by Stephen King
Interestingly, I just watched an episode of anime (Patlabor) made in 1989, which revolves around a group of people, including the Foreign Minister, trapped 200 metres up in a burning building in Tokyo. The first thing I though was, if they made this now, they would all have cellphones on them, so they would not lose contact with the police and firefighters. So that aspect of the episode would not be credible today.
I’ve been watching the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series via Netflix (never saw it when it was broadcast) and I had been wondering how the growing availability of cell phones would affect plot points through the seven seasons.
In the first few seasons, it was entirely plausible that high school students didn’t have cells, so it was no big deal. I watched “First Date” from the final season (which aired in 2003, when it was not plausible at all that young 20-somethings wouldn’t have cell phones) last night – the writers deal with it via Tengu’s third scenario listed upthread.
Of course, this is a series in which Buffy’s neighbors don’t seem to notice/care that her house has been nearly destroyed several times and all kinds of horrific creatures walk up the front sidewalk (to mention just a few couple of disbelief-suspension points among hundreds), so maybe a lack of cell phone technology in Sunnydale isn’t such a stretch.
Remember, this issue goes back at least to Star Trek in the 1960s, when they had to work out a way for the communicators to fail so Kirk couldn’t just tell the crew to beam him out of harm’s way any time there was a problem. (Although sometimes it was the transporter that was blocked or malfunctioned).
Most of them were in college, right? I graduated from college in 2004, and very few of my friends in that class had cell phones at the time. One or two years later, and everyone had them, having had them when they went off to college. But my class was right on the edge. We didn’t have cell phones because we were broke, the dorms already had phone lines, and we’d rather spend $40/month on beer.
It’s not horror or suspense, but when I watch Seinfeld reruns now I think how implausible many of the plots would be if they all just had cell phones…
Actually, that was called Cellular. Good movie, I thought.
Be interesting if someone’s cell phone could pick up on other people’s calls. Or worse yet, their thoughts…
Shit no credit ,fuck pay as you go!I’m going contract next AAAAAAAAAAAARRRgh Whimper.
Actually, the radio with static bit dates from the first Silent Hill. A very creepy effect.
You could always set the piece in the 1970s. “There’s a killer stalking us…and cellphones won’t be available for at least another decade. What should we do?!”
You could start the movie like the Corona commercial where the cell rings and the guy skips it into the water. Then they take their beer and the camera pulls back. Oh, no, they’re staying at the Bates Motel!
Caller ID, GPS, all that…I’m too cheap to buy it. I have a cheapo cell that I leave in the car for emergencies. There are ways around it, I guess. But authors can also embrace the techology and use it to make the cat and mouse game more high tech.
It’s just another device to enhance the suspense, now. As the first victim is pulled out of the room, leaving a bloody trail, they stretch with their last bit of effort and can’t quite reach the cell phone. Instead, they knock it under the bed.
If it’s a crazy guy with an axe or a family of mad cannibals, you would call the police. That’s obvious. But, if the baddies are supernatural, and you do have a cell phone, uh, who ya gonna call?
Ghost…
Nah, too obvious.
Come to think of it, a couple years ago Busch Gardens Tampa adopted a “cell phone/text message” theme for its Halloween event. This had nothing to do with any of the actual haunted houses or shows; every year they choose a different advertising theme for the event, and some years are more inspired than others.
Last year the ads all featured an “evil disc jockey” character who killed people by playing dance mixes at them, and at least they had a guy out front in costume to greet people. A few years back they had an “evil cabdriver” character, who was essentially indistinguishable from any given actual cabdriver.
Anyway: evil text messaging. As an advertising theme, it wasn’t particularly disturbing. But I guess you can’t have clowns every year. I suppose they deserve some credit for being a bit experimental.
If H.P. Lovecraft were still around, I’m sure he’d take advantage of the new technology…
“The Call-Waiting of Cthulhu”
“Pickman’s Motorola”
“The Cellular Out of Space”
“At the Modems of Madness”
In Funny Games, the bad guys make sure to “accidentally” ruin the victim’s cell phone by dropping it in a sink full of water before they reveal themselves as the bad guys.
Not really sure that needed a spoiler box. Very very minor spoiler at most.
-FrL-
