Veteran horror director Kurtis David Harder uses classic genre tropes like bloody scares, bone-chilling twists and stylized violence to thrill audiences for Influencersthe Canadian filmmaker’s follow-up to his original 2023 horror thriller Influencer.
But as young people become increasingly savvy about the dangers of harmful social media content and generative AI tools, Harder also sees its dark tale of one young woman’s chilling obsession with murder and identity theft becoming the perfect horror film for our frightening times.
“Horror is a great platform to delve into the darker sides of society,” Harder said. The Hollywood Reporter before a screening of Influencers at the Whistler Film Festival, just before a Dec. 12 bow on Shudder. “With these two films, we are definitely exploring a very contemporary online world and seeing the ramifications of technology moving forward at full speed, and what the social consequences of that are,” the filmmaker added.
With Influencers as a story of moral erosion disguised as a midnight psychological thriller, Harder places its irredeemably evil characters in the world of social media and the manosphere, rather than in a haunted house or in battle with vampires or zombies. And it does so in a sequel where the conversation about artificial intelligence and deepfake technologies has grown by leaps and bounds over the past two years, when Influencer was released.
Influencers
Jack Rabbit
Harder therefore deliberately creates an emotional doorway to question, at ever deeper levels, the perils of social media algorithms and AI. The haunting and sensually charged CW, played by Cassandra Naud, returns in the sequel to a committed relationship with her girlfriend, played by Lisa Delamar, in the south of France.
But romance is soon replaced by turmoil when CW and his girlfriend meet Charlotte, a popular British influencer played by Georgina Campbell, and then Jacob, the maniacal, misogynistic YouTuber, played by Jonathan Whitesell, and his prissy girlfriend Ariana (Veronica Long). When a psychopathic and exploitative CW gives in to violent impulses, her girlfriend suspects that their happy, carefully constructed life is just a facade that threatens to collapse around her in a whirlwind of chaos.
“We’re seeing a different side of CW in terms of his emotional journey. We’re broadening the scope,” insists Harder, pointing out role reversals and switchbacks to draw in audiences. Influencers to that “OMG, hold my hand!” level on the thrill and chill meter.
Of course, young independent horror directors are constantly told, when working on tight budgets, that filming in Bali or the South of France simply won’t happen. Keep it all on a soundstage in Vancouver, where Harder is based. But this happens in Influencers. “The big advice that a lot of filmmakers give when they’re making an independent film is to keep it contained. Maybe shoot in one house. And I’ve always been drawn to the opposite,” Harder revealed.
SO Influencers by design takes audiences to beautiful foreign settings in Asia and Europe to give travel-loving movie buffs a slasher picture in bed. And that required Harder, as he did with Influencer, working again with a stripped-down crew to enable beautiful films that avoid, as much as possible, production nightmares.
“If you were to bring a crew of 50 people, you would have so much infrastructure that you would be moving from location to location. Whereas when we’re making films like these two, we’re going to a different location almost every day. So to get in and out of those locations, we have to have a small footprint,” says Harder, who highlights his triple-threat skills as a director, writer and producer.
Influencers is also produced by Jack Campbell, Naud, Chris Ball, Taylor Nodrick, Rebecca Campbell and Micah Henry.
