Veteran horror director Kurtis David Harder uses classic genre tropes like blood-soaked scares

creepy twists and stylized violence to send shivers down the spines of audiences for Influencers, the Canadian filmmaker’s follow-up to his 2023 original horror thrillerInfluencer.

But with young people increasingly warned about the dangers of harmful social media content and generative AI tools, Harder also sees his dark tale about a young woman’s chilling obsession with murder and identity theft becoming the perfect scary film for our scary times.

“Horror is a great platform to dive into the darker sides of society,” Harder told The Hollywood Reporter ahead of a screening of Influencers at the Whistler Film Festival, just before a Dec. 12 bow on Shudder. “With these two movies, we’re definitely exploring a very contemporary online world, and seeing the ramifications of technology that is speeding ahead, and what are the social consequences of that,” the filmmaker added.

With Influencers as a tale of moral erosion disguised as a midnight psychological thriller, Harder sets his irredeemably bad characters in the world of social media and the manosphere, rather than in a haunted house or in battle with vampires or zombies. And he does so in a sequel where the conversation about artificial intelligence and deepfake technologies has advanced by leaps and bounds from two years ago, when Influencer was released.

So Harder deliberately creates an emotional doorway to question, at ever deeper levels, the perils of social media algorithms and AI. That has a mesmerizing, sensually-charged CW, played by Cassandra Naud, returns in the sequel in a committed relationship with her girlfriend, played by Lisa Delamar, in the south of France.

But romance is soon replaced by turmoil as CW and her girlfriend meet Charlotte, a popular British influencer played by Georgina Campbell, and then Jacob, the manic and 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 their carefully constructed, blissful life is a facade that threatens to collapse around them in a whirlwind of chaos.

“We’re seeing another side of CW in terms of her emotional journey. We’re expanding the scope,” Harder insists, as he points to role reversals and switchbacks to get the audience for Influencers to that “OMG, hold my hand!” level on the thrills and chills meter.

Of course, young indie horror directors are forever being told when working with tight budgets that filming in Bali or the south of France just won’t happen. Keep it all on a soundstage in Vancouver, where Harder is based. But that happens in Influencers. “The big advice for a lot of filmmakers when you’re making an independent film is keep it contained. Maybe shoot in one house. And I’ve always been drawn to the opposite of that,” Harder revealed.

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So Influencers by design takes audiences to gorgeous foreign backdrops in Asian and Europe to bring film-lovers with a travel bug a bed-hopping slasher pic. And that called for Harder, as he did with Influencer, to work again with a stripped down crew to allow beautiful filmmaking that avoids, where possible, production nightmares.

“If you were to bring a 50-person crew, you’d have so much infrastructure that you’re moving to each location. Whereas when we’re filming movies like these two, we’re going to a different location almost every day. So to get in and out of these locations, we have to have a small footprint,” Harder, who underscores his triple-threat skills as a film director, screenwriter and producer, explains.