Ratter Interview: Branden Kramer
Ratter first screened at last year’s London Film Festival and it really was one of the stand-out skin crawlers. The film deals with a cyber phenomena known as ‘ratting’ wherein someone hacks into someone else’s camera technology, usually on a home PC, to secretly watch their victim.
The film stars Pretty Little Liars actress Ashley Benson as Emma, a young college student who unknowingly becomes the target of an obsessive hacker. The film goes to some very dark places and is an excellent cautionary tale that should be watched by everybody. Ratter does such a great job of highlighting the frankly quite scary craze that this writer now has a sticker permanently obscuring her webcam.
The story started life as short film Webcam, a frightening tale that ended up going viral, and inspiring director Branden Kramer to expand it to a feature length narrative. We sat down with Kramer to discuss the terrifying cyber crime, the film and the importance that we as a society gain a wider knowledge of just what our technology is capable of.
Ratter Interview: Branden Kramer
When did you first hear about ‘Ratting’?
About four years ago I had a friend that this actually kinda happened to, not this whole story of obsession, but her webcam light would automatically go on and off randomly. Four years ago neither she or I knew about this concept, that the hacking of a webcam was possible, not many people did. So immediately when I saw that, she thought it was a glitch or something, a software malfunction – I was like ‘woah, what if this is a hacker, or someone watching?’ All of these questions came about, ‘what have they seen? How long have they been watching? Who is it?’ The questions are endless. So the story [for Ratter] wrote itself. I thought I had to make a film about this now to tell people.
When I did research I found that not many people did know, no one had told that story before. We shot a short film called Webcam that the feature is based on. During that period I did the research to find out just how often it happens and how realistic it is. It happens quite more than you think and it’s not that hard to do. You don’t have to be an expert hacker, you can just copy and paste code that already exists and use that, it’s terrifying. So then we realised that there’s actually a term for it, these people are called ‘Ratters’, there’s a whole underground sick community that trade in these feeds, these hacked feeds, that can go on for months or years. Usually its women that are being watched, let’s be honest, it’s all people but generally it’s women that are being watched and sometime they’re being watched by multiple people at once. It’s really super creepy, unbelievably creepy.
The FBI reached out to us about it, which was very, very random and interesting. Because the short took off, it had three or four million views, the FBI reached out and asked if they could use it as a part of their cyber security presentations. They would consult to big corporations in the States, that’s the sort of validation we needed to think that this is something that’s really popping right now and is relevant to all of us.
Ratter Interview: Branden Kramer
What is it about ratting that appeals to these people do you think?
That’s a question that none of us really know the answer to but I think we’re all sort of voyeuristic creatures to a certain degree. We all have that side of us. We can all go on Facebook and watch someone’s videos if we wanted, there’s that degree of sort of honest, regular, healthy voyeurism. Then there’s this voyeurism that’s cocky and more dangerous where it becomes an obsession, which the film obviously goes into.
I think there’s a certain element of sexual dark side that these ratters have. They watch someone whose just completely unaware and the realness that it gives probably gives them some sort of thrill. It’s like reality TV that you’re in control of. It’s a power thing. I think its really ultimately about power.
There are some cases, big cases like the Miss Teen USA, that happened where they tried to extort her. This is a theme that’s happening a lot in some of these cases where they actually caught the guy or the hacker. Once they have nude pictures or videos of the victim they’ll contact them and show them the video or pictures and say ‘if you don’t give me what I want’ – and usually its like a personal sexual video or some other pictures – ‘if you don’t give me this then I will send this to everyone, I’ll share it with the world, I’ll send it to your friends, put it on your Facebook.’ It’s extortion and blackmail – ‘if you go to the police I’ll make this public’ it’s really terrifying.
I live with someone whose very cyber secure and they’ve been telling me about this sort of stuff for years, but it wasn’t until watching Ratter that it really hit home…
Exactly! So that’s the thing about any idea really. You can hear something, technical information or anything really and if it doesn’t have an emotional impact then you won’t remember it. It’s like anything that you remember, if you’re emotionally engaged and you actually can feel something relevant to the idea then it’ll really make an impact. You’ll remember it and think about it consciously. Its one thing to hear information, but its another thing to experience the feeling of it.
How difficult was it to rework Webcam from a short film into something longer?
It was quite a challenge. Having the other devices helped, because the short film is just the laptop whereas in the feature we have a few more angles, the phone and the video game console. The main challenge was how to maintain suspense and keep people engaged in this format, in this way of telling a story, this executional style. A big part of the process was not only the writing, the writing was a challenge, but the editing was a huge part. We shot the film in three weeks but we edited the film in five months. So the story was made in the editing room. We had a great editor Shelby Siegel who I definitely want to call out because she’s awesome. It was a pivotal process and it just goes to show how much a film relies on editing.
Ratter Interview: Branden Kramer
How did you shoot the film? Did you really shoot on laptops and camera phones?
So we had three cameras, I’d say our most sophisticated camera, our biggest one, which wasn’t big at all, was the Black Magic. It’s a digital, cinematic grade camera, and that was the Xbox Kinect, the still, wide angle shot. Then we used Go-Pro’s for the laptop, which was great because its small and you can just attach it – we rigged it up to the laptop. Then for a lot of the cell phone shots we used a Go-Pro and an actual iPhone. We actually shot on an iPhone which was interesting.
Because of the nature of the story and how it is filmed there are a lot of ‘unflattering’ camera shots -obviously Emma is supposed to be unaware. I imagine for a young actress that it could be quite daunting to be seen at those angles and situations. How did Ashley [Benson] cope and how important was it to have someone who would commit to it?
She was fully onboard from the jump. Like right from the get go she knew, it was all in the script, it wasn’t a surprise. Our first phone call before she signed on just to make sure she understood what this thing really was about and what in entailed and demanded of her. She loved the script and she was completely on board with the unflattering shots and it being natural, so no or very little make up. She loved that.
Ratter Interview: Branden Kramer
Ashley Benson has a legion of teen fans from her role in Pretty Little Liars; what do you hope they might learn from Emma’s ordeal?
I think with the younger generation the difference is you and I are a bit older, we know what life was like before Facebook, Twitter and the internet, iphones and cameras blah, blah, blah. But younger people, some of which are her [Ashley’s] fans they don’t know anything else. This is what they were raised with. This is like second nature to them. So what we hope to achieve is just, that’s why we called it Ratter, is kinda like Catfish how that became a thing, a more popularised concept that people were more aware of. That’s what we wanted with this, have it emotionally engaging to the point that people talk about it and are more cautious and more aware of how vulnerable we can be. What if you’re not careful, could happen. I mean, we don’t want to [purposely] scare people, that’s great, but we want it to be a very positive thing. At the same time though it takes a certain amount of responsibility with what’s public and what’s seen.
Ratter Interview: Branden Kramer
There seems to be a fell of cyber lead thrillers/horrors starting to appear; the internet’s been around for years so why do you think its only now that these films are getting made?
I think a lot has to do with just the visual language that we’re all used to these days. We’re all used to consuming media and movies now on laptops. We’re now more exposed to just the format, a film doesn’t have to be so rigid in its form. It could be very organic and flexible if the story requires. There are some films that should be beautifully shot, but there are other films like this where its not [as important]. We didn’t set out to make a found-footage / POV type of film, that just happened to go along perfectly with the story. It’s always the story that came first and how best to tell that story.
Why its relevant right now is I think that there’s a certain helplessness in the zeitgeist right now. I think that culturally we’re all now becoming aware how reliant we are on these devices. Everyone jokes around about ‘oh we’ll out at dinner and we’re all checking our phones,’ but its kinda a little it fucked up (laughs). What does it say about our society that we’re not all really connecting with each other in real life? Anyways I think there’s a certain helplessness that we are feeling that we are really reliant, we’re constantly on these devices and yet we don’t quite know how to properly protect ourselves.
There’s a certain feeling of vulnerability that you can’t be 100% sure; there’s that little bit of paranoia that I think we can all feel. There are things and companies being hacked left and right and yet I don’t quite know how hacking works. I’m not an IT person who knows how it works, very few people understand it. We use these devices so much and yet we know so little about how they work, it’s that gap that gives us the helplessness.
There are plenty of real life victims of ratting, what made you want to tell a fiction story rather than creating a documentary?
I think it was just to tell a really emotionally engaging story. Yeah you could have absolutely achieved that with a documentary, but I just prefer fiction. I just wanted to tell a story.
Ratter Interview: Branden Kramer
Towards the climax of Ratter the film shifts into some really dark places, why did you decide to go in this direction.
Even for me, its hard to watch. I’ve seen it a hundred times, but still without giving too much away, I think it was a choice that we made and we needed for it to be powerful and that was the best way we could think to do it. That was the only way for it to be powerful enough for people to talk about it.
Ratter is available to download digitally now, and arrives on Blu-ray and DVD from Monday 4th April. Click here to read our review.
