See the sights, take some snaps, bathe in the blood of
your enemies
dir: Kurtis David Harder
2025
Who does deserve to die in horror films? It’s fiction, so, it’s okay?
But when you look at the genre, and you think about what anxieties this genre often captures, it’s sometimes hard not to extrapolate and conjure the imagined worldview of the makers based on who does the killing and who gets killed.
The slasher flicks of the 80s allegedly were right wing coded, because the kids killed by Jason / Freddie / Michael Myers were the ones doing drugs, drinking and having pre-marital sex, thus it was cautionary.
A flick where rich people hunt the poor, and then a ‘poor’ who they underestimate kills them back and Gets Revenge is not really a right-wing take on how to deal with the homelessness ‘problem’. Similarly, a flick where poor crims kidnap a rich person’s kid for ransom money isn’t necessarily a progressive argument for equity in wealth redistribution.
Obviously, since this flick is called Influencers, and it’s a continuation of the story started in Influencer from 2022, you’d think the flick is taking the radical position of saying that influencers in general and often specifically deserve to die because they are a cancer on society, metastasising across the world through the perniciousness of social media.
Not only die, like we all do anyway, but die violently, cut off in their clicks and likes harvesting prime.
Few flicks that premiere on the most excellent of horror streaming services, being Shudder, have that much of a budget, yet this film incredibly captures amazing footage and moves around multiple postcard worthy locations, between Bali, France and the States, and there’s some footage from Thailand but I think that’s footage from the previous flick anyway, on what had to be a slender budget. Yet it looks phenomenal.
Of course, CW (Cassandra Naud) is back, because these flicks are nothing without her, but she’s been living a quiet life in France with her girlfriend Diane (Lisa Delamar), and hasn’t murdered anyone for ages. It must be really hard for her to resist those impulses, but I guess she’s been lucky in that she hasn’t been provoked by any influencers for a good long time.
She makes the mistake of booking a weekend getaway to some fancy shmancy place, where, even though she booked the fanciest suite, they get bumped for some influencer, and are put into a room not fit for mangy goats (the room is fine). She is already irritated.
By the time they meet the appalling influencer by the pool, where she’s complaining about the pool, the room and how shitty the whole place is (even though they’ve comped everything for her, so that she’ll influence morons into going there through her videos).
Charlotte (Georgina Campbell) isn’t that obnoxious, but CW obviously takes a fatal dislike to her right from the start. When she starts lying and manipulating, and charming Diane, it’s not as if CW needed much prompting to resume her murderous ways. But the wonderful thing about CW is that even if all her plans don’t always work out, she can at least plan, and she’s done this before, and she’s good at it.
But she’s not a supervillain. Even the best have off days, and she couldn’t have predicted that today, their one year anniversary, would be the day that Diane finds out CW isn’t exactly who she pretends to be.
It is nearly half an hour before the title and opening credits appear on the screen, similarly prompting a laugh from me, in a similar manner in which this director did the same thing in the first flick with a very story.
And yet that’s the first point in which the story jumps to a different protagonist. Madison (Emily Tennant), who was CW’s first victim in the first flick, made it out of Thailand alive, but she’s become this Amanda Knox-like figure in this era of “true crime” podcast bros and internet ubiquity, where she’s still the one blamed for CW’s murderous rampage a few years ago. Even though the authorities decided not to prosecute her, every fuckhead with an opinion thinks they’re also Hercule fucking Poirot, and are convinced her story about the mysterious CW is bullshit.
This is also an era where people think it’s fine to issue death threats to complete strangers for saying things like “I don’t like ice cream” or “stop the genocide in Palestine”, so Madison is convinced no-one is going to find CW unless she does, because she’s probably right, since no-one else cares that much.
When I joked about supervillainy before, I failed to mention that CW does actually have a superpower, because the film makes the link between the appalling impact of social media and CW’s incredible abuse of technology in order to evade capture and also profit from extensive fraud. When she murders an influencer, she makes damn sure she keeps posting as them in order to confuse anyone who might be looking for them. In a bracing use of AI, she uses an “assistant” with a delightful Parisian accent in order to a) feel better about herself b) keep track of who might be after her, but always, always, she’s using tech for evil and not good.
And yet. The thing is, who’s side are we on?
When we’re watching Matt Damon in The Talented Mr Ripley, or Andrew Scott playing the same character in the Netflix series Ripley, who’s side are we really on? We know it’s wrong, the killings, though sometimes poetic in their justice, are never morally justifiable (murder not being morally justifiable) because they’re still driven by deep seeded, dark needs. And yet we become complicit, don’t we, for our own reasons wanting the protagonist to get away for a little longer.
CW sometimes kills spontaneously, sometimes in a calculated manner, but when it’s calculated, it’s because an influencer has really pissed her off with their awful vapidity, but when it’s spontaneous, it’s because she’s been backed into a corner, and does it to survive.
When the setting shifts to Bali, of course, OF COURSE the flick is going to find someone worse than influencers in general, so we are gifted with a manosphere Youtuber / Twitch streamer type jerk in the form of Jacob (Johnathan Whitesell) and his even worse alt-right influencer girlfriend Ariana (Veronica Long). Oh they’re just the worst. Zero qualms in my heart with wishing them dead. No-one deserves what happens to these poor idiots, because, ouch, but like a great man once said, being Clint Eastwood in his film Unforgiven “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.”
It is, perversely, Madison that brings these particular influencers into CW’s orbit, so, in a strange turn up for the books, it’s almost as if Madison’s pursuit of justice which causes an even greater catastrophe, but even if she thinks she knows what CW is capable of, she isn’t really able to see just how far she’s willing to go in order to keep doing what she loves (which is living in luxury and murdering influencers).
The ending. The ending of this flick. Fucking hell. While I might quibble with some elements, it’s pretty much a spectacular climax that sees a) absolutely some justice is served, which means there is some fairness in this dismal universe, but also b) CW turns into an angel of death as the camera pulls off some incredible drone camerawork capturing a rampage like few others committed to film.
A psychopathic killer who lives by the technological sword technically dies by the technological sword, so maybe there’s an aptness to the ending that’s meant to be a tad ironic. It’s also meant to look a bit like “there’s no way she’s getting out of this one now.”
But let me remind you that the ‘twist’ ending of the last flick was also the trenchant and never answered question that kept being asked of CW throughout this flick being “how did you get off that island?”
When she’s asked, she smiles. We can glean that it was something horrific, no doubt, but it’s also mysterious to drive us bonkers. And also remind us of how resourceful this remarkable psychopath is.
She’s a character for the ages, and she has my full support. There should be an entire series set around her, where each week she destroys the life of an unrepentant influencer until they all just pack it up and go back to working behind the counter at Sephora or at a vape shop, and social media collapses entirely. Sure, it could take thousands of episodes before it happens, but I’d watch every single one. I sat through three appalling seasons of Hannibal, and I would certainly do it for All Influencers Must Die.
She’s a force of nature, and she plays this character perfectly. Influencers manages to be the ideal sequel that’s it’s own distinct story, yet doesn’t ape or repeat the original just because they couldn’t think of anything new to do.
They thought up plenty more ways to make horrible things happen to rich, empty people.
8 times I of course don’t want bad things to happen to anyone, except maybe just the most terrible ones out of 10
--
“I see you.” – see in the sequel, too, hopefully - Influencers
- 135 reads