While Catfish presents as a convincingly real fake-documentary (currently awaiting its BIG reveal), I'd suggest that it is even more interesting to think about this already interesting work as a horror film. In Men, Women, and Chainsaws, Carol Clover carefully draws out the unsettling binaries that create the discomfort and unease that produce horror, and one of these is the city/country divide also then gendered male/female, respectively. This complex observation makes Catfish seem simple. The arty, Jewish city boys arrive late-night to an abandoned horse-farm in Michigan, and get pretty creeped out: all those dark pastures. At this moment, we are cued to think the movie might shift to the scary fakery of its creepy user-generated cousins, Blair Witch or Paranormal Activity, but things stay more benign and less bloody, or more techy and networky, for these lucky city slickers. Facebook, and social networking more generally, are the invention and would-be provenance of urban effete geeks (see Social Network), who must eventually open the network up to the whole world, and then--scary!--uneducated, unstylish, overweight plebes (and their grotesque offspring) can join the conversation (no longer restricted to Harvard), and then, even more horrifying, they can pass for their masters by expertly making use of this self-same technology, cell phones and fake friends, and you might even enjoy sexting with one! YUCK.
What makes Catfish so convincing as a "documentary" is our disbelief that the hideously red-state Angela Wesselman-Pierce could be played by an actress (her grossly retarded sons, and nearly retarded husband serve as ethical anchor to her "real"), while it is much more obvious to the art-film viewer's eye when Banksy or Joaquin (in their glamorous, urban, sophistication) act the part. Here the slow-witted husband's astute commentary about the wily, provocative catfish provides the generically pleasing twist on the city/country divide, where the bumpkins prove to be more sophisticated and worthy then their movie-making masters, imminently more qualified to produce alternative personalities on-line (Tara's alters are the metaphor we all need to understand life on the net), given the all too self-evident bankruptcy of their mundane daily lives off-line.