Udo Kier, Jeffrey Combs, Nigel Terry, and Michael Sarrazin also appear in the film in supporting roles.

The victim, Polidori, exhibits bleeding from his eyes and other orifices and, by the frozen look on his face, appears to have seen something horrifying before being hit by a train.

Initially they are unable to find anything to connect the deaths; after some more digging for clues, they eventually discover that all of the victims' computers crashed shortly before their passings.

Upon viewing the site herself, Denise is subjected to various sights and sounds of torture that eventually drive her insane, resulting in her falling to her death from her apartment window.

As they begin to experience paranoia and hallucinations, including that of a young girl and her inflatable ball, they race against time to figure out if any of it has any connection to an extremely vicious serial killer, Alistair Pratt, who has been eluding Mike and the FBI for years.

"[15] Jeffrey Combs, who had appeared in Malone's previous feature, House on Haunted Hill, was cast in a supporting part as a detective.

It would receive subsequent theatrical releases in numerous countries throughout the ensuing months, debuting in the United Kingdom and Ireland on June 27, 2003.

After multiple trims and appeals, the film was finally re-rated R by the MPAA for "violence including grisly images of torture, nudity and language".

[21] In October 2024, Dark Star Pictures released the film on Blu-ray for the first time, first made available through the Vinegar Syndrome online store, with a general street date of November 26, 2024.

[29] Both Mark Kermode of The Observer and Cynthia Fuchs of PopMatters wrote of the premise's similarity to Ringu as well as Kairo and David Cronenberg's Videodrome.

"[32] The Guardian called it a "nasty, badly acted horror film [...] like Marc Evans' My Little Eye or Olivier Assayas' execrable Demonlover, it manages to be both prurient and very, very naive about the internet.

"[33] Roger Ebert gave the film a mixed review, rating two out of four stars and noting, "strange, how good FeardotCom is, and how bad.

The screenplay is a mess, and yet the visuals are so creative this is one of the rare bad films you might actually want to see" and praising the last 20 minutes as something which, if it "had been produced by a German impressionist in the 1920s, we'd be calling it a masterpiece."

He added, "The movie is extremely violent; it avoided the NC-17 rating and earned an R, I understand, after multiple trims and appeals, and even now it is one of the most graphic horror films I've seen.

"[6] Jami Bernard of The New York Daily News said, "The story is a mess, some of the images offensive, the acting under par and the dialogue silly.

"[36] Writing for The Globe and Mail, Liam Lacey wrote of the film's potential for cult status, adding: "but the movie's progression into rambling incoherence gives new meaning to the phrase 'fatal script error.