Looking for a scary movie this Halloween? Well, don’t watch Megan is Missing

Want to soil yourself AND have your heart broken at the same time? Then Megan Is Missing is the Halloween movie for you… just please don’t make me watch it again.

If you’re anything like me, you have a few classic horror movies you return to every Halloween. Nothing too emotionally taxing, just enough to put you in the spooky spirit – think Hocus Pocus, Death Becomes Her, Corpse Bride. If I’m feeling really confident, Scream and Halloween will be thrown into the mix.

But anything more than that is ridiculous… right? Halloween is just a chance for young kids to wind up their neighbors and for parents to stress themselves out ferrying their precious little ones from door to door. So when I had the unhinged idea to watch Megan Is Missing – one of the most heinous horror movies of all time – for a themed piece, I shocked myself.

The context is probably clear already, but I am not a horror movie aficionado. In fact, out of the whole Dexerto team, I’m a complete dunce – I hadn’t even heard of Megan Is Missing before I joined. Obviously, it makes the most sense that I’m the sacrificial lamb thrown onto the fire, so I decided to live blog it (Editor’s Note: Yes, this isn’t technically live but who are you, the Live Blog police?).

If you haven’t heard of it either, Megan Is Missing follows the aforementioned Megan (Rachel Quinn) and her best friend Amy (Amber Perkins), who absolutely everybody at school hates. When Megan is kidnapped by a guy she met on a web chat room, Amy tries to find her single-handedly… and you can guess how well that pans out. 

Let’s set the scene. It’s 1am on Sunday morning. I’m at home in bed, and all the lights are off. I’ve been off the booze all weekend, which, in hindsight, was an excellent idea considering. To finish off what had been a very enjoyable Saturday, I’ve popped on a tale of teen abduction to soothe me to sleep.

Fresh from my notes app to your eyes, here’s my full moment-by-moment rundown of Megan Is Missing as Dexerto’s in-house horror chicken – and your sign to PLEASE not do the same thing.  

1:00am – Use of “Daddy” and “sl*t” within seconds of each other oh NO. Oh no. The horrors start here, honey!!

(Side note: what 14-year-olds speak like this? Was I naive growing up?)

1:02am – Remember that film Thirteen where baby Evan Rachel Woods goes off the rails and Holly Hunter is at her wits end? This feels like that with webcams.

1:04am – Just remembered what I was doing in 2007… cut my hair into a bob because I wanted to be Velma Kelly, often wore a garish yellow Hairspray sweater, and used Maybelline Dream Matte Mousse. What happened to core teen hobbies?

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1:05am – Ben is hilariously laughable. Andrew Tate levels of delusion.

1:06am – Maybe the real horrors were the people charging $10 for a house party along the way.

1:11am – Okay, this has turned disgusting so quick. Men are society’s constant villain etc etc.

1:17am – Unexpected Se7en nod during a description of molestation! The marketing Fincher never saw coming!

1:20am – I would have watched the cat documentary, Amy.

1:22am – “I’ll pretty much do what you want, but you have to tell me you love me” went straight through me. Genuinely haunting.

1:29am – He was a SkaterDude, she should have said cya later, dude…

1:31am – I wish you could see my face watching this, dear reader. If the wind changed direction, I’d look like a disgruntled Real Housewife at an end-of-season reunion forever.

1:45am – Note to the public: if I ever go missing, please do not put a photo of me licking peanut butter off a knife on national news.

1:48am – Oof the casual misogyny in this thing. The gaslighting! The entitlement! The fact I feel so immune to it all!

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1:53am – Okay, it’s start-sh*tting-yourself time!!

1:54am – Why are the police not monitoring these WebChat calls?!

1:55am – But they can fork out for a Crimewatch-style reenactment?

1:57am – The photos have just flashed up, and I feel SICK. Like, run down my entire throat sick. It’s not what I expected, but somehow also worse???

1:58am – My cat has just jumped on the bed in the dark, and I’ve fully sh*t myself. Sorry to be basic, but the light is going on. The big light too… I’m not taking any chances.

2:06am – God, this is absolutely horrific… I think this is the first time I’ve actually seen a sexual assault scene like this. Something tells me they’ve truly captured a realistic visceral reaction.

2:08am – THE BARREL. Oh. My. God. That got a full jumpscare-gasp reaction combo from me. I’m actually hiding behind my poor cat. Thankfully, she’s purring with her eyes closed. God, these poor girls. They better have had good therapy access on this set!

2:20am – What I didn’t expect to happen was to be crying my eyes out. What a heartbreaking final 10 mins. Sure, it’s supposed to be gross and horrific, but I can feel my innards ripping in two. It’s every woman’s worst nightmare. Those pleas were coming from such a gutteral place, trying every trick in the book to appeal to one ounce of human emotion… that just wasn’t there.

2:25am – Editor Tom… I marginally hate you for agreeing this was a good idea. Now convinced there is someone standing in the dark part of my hallway.

2:26am – The play-out footage is the final kick in the teeth, but I’ve made it. I absolutely hated it. Experienced every negative emotion there is. But mostly, I’m so surprised at how overwhelmingly sad it is.

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2:27am – I need a water break and to watch an episode of Shaun the Sheep or something. But I’ll add an outro covering a) if I had nightmares and b) my thoughts on Megan Is Missing in the movie when my heart stops hurting.

12:30pm – It’s the next day and I’m trying to continue life as normal. Amazingly, I didn’t have any nightmares, but the weight of what I’d watched kept me up for most of the night.

Here’s the thing: I think Megan Is Missing is a pretty badly made film. The found-footage element hasn’t aged well, the discrimination embedded into our core cast is beyond distasteful, and the performances aren’t overly amazing either.

However, it’s left an aftertaste in my mouth that I can’t shake. If you’re looking for a Halloween movie you’ll be scared by; this isn’t the choice. Instead, you’ll be staring the worst parts of life directly in the eye.

I don’t think I’ll ever forget the final 30 minutes for as long as I live, and that’s as it should be. But it doesn’t take a quick scroll through some internet forums to ask if Megan Is Missing has achieved this in the right way.

Some of the dark web is getting off on this, which frankly is a bigger horror than anything a film can commit to screen. While it likely leaves most shaken to the core, there’s the odd anomaly that might see this as permission granted. 

SkaterDude might seem like a retro scam decades later, but the person behind the webcam website still exists. That, in a nutshell, will keep me up at night for a long time to come. 

For more Halloween content, check out our full Terror-Tober schedule, including the scariest movie villains, the best zombie movies, and what a psychologist thinks is the most horrific movie of the year.