Teen thriller You’ve Been T@gged now streaming

Scream (1996-2011) was the thriller franchise of the ’90s. A masked maniac would phone you to let you know that he was coming to kill you – like that was just phone etiquette at the time.

Times have changed, and these days we’d really rather get stabbed than answer a call from an unknown number. So now we have You’ve Been T@gged (2017-current, Seasons 1-3 are on Showmax), an 11-episode thriller series in which some maniac calling themselves “m0nk3ym4nnn” starts a reign of terror by tagging high school students Hailey Jensen (Lia Marie Johnson), Rowan Fricks (Lulu Antariksa) and Elisia (Katelyn Nacon) in a violent video … and threatening worse to come. Suddenly everyone around them is a suspect and a Pretty Little Liars-style mystery begins as the girls try to unmask their tormentor and uncover a secret past connection between them all.

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Normally you could pry our phones from our cold dead paws, but You’ve Been T@gged has a way of making our little hand-held internetty friend look super-super-creepy. Here are five new reasons to fear your phone…

Creep videos

In episode two the girls find out that “m0nk3ym4nnn” isn’t just sending them videos. They’ve posted footage online that proves that the girls have been followed on the way home. And not just to their front doors (which they have also taken creep footage of), but inside, into their rooms. A video shows that m0nk3ym4nnn (or their creepster friends) has stood over one of the girl’s beds and filmed them sleeping. Everyone has a phone, everyone could be filming you at any time.

I know that face! Look out for real-life YouTube stars like JC Caylen (Sean), Claudia Sulewski (Nicki) and Lia Marie Johnson (Hailey).

Oversharing

m0nk3ym4nnn is able to threaten the girls with all sorts of “secrets” that they’ve unwittingly placed online over the years. Imagine if someone hacked into your phone then linked you all the way back to your earliest Sam/Dean “Wincest” Supernatural fan fiction, duck lip photos and tearful meltdown when Zayn left One Direction. And then imagine that they took all that stuff and sent it to your school and family groups. Shotgun murder would be a merciful death at that point.

No safe space

The three girls have a choice between running the gauntlet of continuous harassment online from m0nk3ym4nnn or becoming digital hermits, which is just too real. Millie Bobby Brown recently left Twitter because people kept posting memes of her pictures with homophobic sentiments written on them, and Star Wars actress Kelly Marie Tran was forced to delete her Instagram account because of the non-stop racist and sexist comments that people were posting there. Both of their accounts were “beaten to death” deliberately and maliciously.

Monkey rage

m0nk3ym4nnn is clearly festering with resentment about all three girls and using the internet as a tool to stalk and harass them based on real or imagined rejections. The anonymity of the online space and the ability to send messages as an “unknown” person allows him full scope for emotional terrorism without consequences to himself, including when he posts an image of a bed covered in guns and a pair of cheerleader pompoms in episode seven, and everyone flips out believing that he’s threatening a school shooting during assembly the next day.

Prank culture

The girls initially assume that m0nk3ym4nnn’s shotgun murder video is a prank. Any number of non-consenting people have been tricked into being the subject of annoying online videos perpetrated in the name of prank culture by idiots with phones – including when Logan Paul went to Japan’s Aokigahara “suicide forest” in December 2017 and posted footage of himself joking around with a suicide victim online, then tried to claim on Good Morning America, “The idea was to just do another fun vlog. Go camp for a night, and make an entertaining piece of content in a forest.” Such fun.

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