Are Influencers The New Horny Teens? 

Are Influencers The New Horny Teens? Temptation, work, Final Girls and the erotics of disavowal.

SUPERHOST (2021), INFLUENCER (2022), MIND BODY SPIRIT (2022), SISSY (2022), DEADSTREAM (2022), SPREE (2020) and CAM (2018) 

Content warning for brief references to suicide and sexual assault.

Hey hey hey my follower fam, it’s your girl Kit coming atcha again with a #FaceForRadio and a #CravingForContent! I am literally so glad you can share this experience with me today because, oh my gosh, guys, this is going to be so, so special, and I am #thankful for every. single. one. of. you! 

Ahem. Okay hang on, hang on, need to clear my throat. Ach. Bleh. Sorry. How did that play? Like, authentic but not too downbeat? We can put the throat-clear in a cut, right, that’s relatable. I mean, not too obvious, I don’t want to be cringe, but I don’t want to play so fake people start looking for reasons to cancel me, so – okay, okay, ready to go again? Right. 

Wait, who let that guy in? Is that knife supposed to be a prop? What’s going on . . . ?

You probably got the point I was making there. Influencers are very easy to parody – especially if you don’t mind being glib. 

And lately it’s felt like taking a selfie for the ’gram is to current horror what having premarital sex was to the old slashers: a big arrow labelled, ‘GUESS WHO’S GONNA DIE?!’

I was noodling on Shudder for my next subject, is the thing. I tried to watch a series they have called Horror’s Greatest and the first episode was on Tropes and Cliches, and I got so discouraged seeing them bang on about how great it is to see the same thing a million times that I had to stop. 

But this thing, made in 2024, was still talking like ‘horny teens must die’ was a relevant trope.

Nah. These days turning down sex with a nice guy gets a fictional woman killed at least as often as getting into bed with him.

Horror tropes of this kind are like Rumpelstiltskin monsters: once you name them, their power evaporates. You may still enjoy their ritualistic re-enactment, but that’s not a deep scare. Horror works on fear and rage, and those things have the most force when they’re rumbling in our psychological basements, not dragged chattering into the light. If we see horny kids killed in movies nowadays, it’s not to shock, it’s for cosy nostalgia.

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t things that evoke rage today. 

And one of the things that really, really seems to piss people off is social media influencers.

My theory was this: that influencers are today’s horny teenagers, at least in terms of horror-movie victims. They’re meat for the grinder, characters we know will die and don’t much care. 

I’ve gone through seven movies testing this theory out; no doubt there are more, but that feels like plenty. We’ll go into each, but to start out, let’s address a fundamental question – not least so that if you feel the urge to exclaim, ‘But some influencers really suck!’, you’ll know that there’s no disagreement here. Some of them do.

Are these movies having a go at real-life influencer crimes?

When it comes to horny teenagers it’s pretty simple: teenagers being horny is a real thing that happens. They don’t deserve to die, obviously, but if you fill the screen with pretty girls jumping into bed with their boyfriends then you are at least correct. There is indeed such a thing as a nice-looking teenager who has consensual sex for fun.

But what are the sins of real influencers as compared with movie ones?

Some influencers have been cruel criminals. 

Natalie Reynolds paid a woman $20 to jump in a lake despite knowing the woman couldn’t swim, and then abandoned her in the water. (She was rescued.) 

YouTuber ‘Ssoyoung’ filmed mukbang videos in which she ate live squid and octopus, animals with highly sensitive nervous systems and intelligence about equivalent to a dog’s. 

Ruby Franke was a ‘momfluencer’ who horribly abused the children she forced to perform. 

Kat Torres was both a social media influencer and a human trafficker. 

If bad things happened to any of these people I doubt many of us would feel sorry for them. (Just to be clear, don’t go do bad things to them yourself, we aren’t trying to live out a horror movie here.) But this isn’t about vapid twenty-somethings smiling into a cellphone: it’s about the active exploitation and mistreatment of human beings. 

That isn’t meat-for-the-grinder behaviour, it’s villain behaviour. 

Some influencers pull ‘stunts’ that cross the line from cheeky to illegal.

YaNike, a Brussels-based YouTuber, filmed himself throwing buckets of excrement over Metro passengers and got caught with tear gas sprayers.

Daniel Jarvis and four others staged a much-too-convincing fake robbery at the National Portrait Gallery in London that put bystanders in such fear that several people were trampled in the rush to escape.

Tiktoker Charles Smith filmed himself putting poisonous bug spray on the fruit and veg at a Walmart. 

I don’t imagine many people reading this will think, ‘Goodness, what a draconian suppression of free speech!’ when I tell you that arresting officers collared them all. 

Some real influencers are wildly irresponsible and recklessly insensitive. 

Anna Redman posted a ‘packing hack’ video in which she cheerfully planned the short black dress and white sandals she’d wear while visiting Auchwitz. 

Logan Paul visited Aokigahara Forest knowing it was a common suicide site, found the body of a man who had recently hanged himself, filmed the man and uploaded a video called ‘We found a dead body in Japanese Suicide Forest’. 

Let’s not pretend these aren’t all shitty, shitty things to do. We’ll take a moment to say that.

But if we’re talking about how horror movies react to shitty, shitty behaviour – well, anger is an emotion horror is good at expressing. But how many of these movies show an influencer doing something that awful? 

Because they kind of don’t. 

The sin isn’t being so obsessed with your own content that you do something horrendous to real people. It’s more being obsessed with your own content at all. 

Who are we working with here? Let’s look at the movies. 

I’m going to say something right at the start: please pay attention to the difference in framing when it comes to male and female influencers. 

Sissy 

Spoilers, but honestly you can probably see them coming. 

Cecilia, formerly known as Sissy (Aisha Dee), is a vlogger with a focus on emotional wellness. She’s actually quite successful, but underneath she’s dreadfully insecure: she was bullied as a child, and when she runs into both the bully and the BFF of her youth, matters quickly grow tense. Eventually Cecilia bursts out into explosive violence; bloodbaths ensue from which she emerges the sole survivor, more famous than ever with an audience who doesn’t know the truth about the monster they so admire. 

What’s Cecilia’s relationship to being an influencer? It’s a job, sure, but really it seems to be an attempt at self-healing. Which, in the rather mean-spirited logic of this film, is impossible: this is one of those horror movies where trauma makes you monstrous and you can’t un-monster yourself. Her motives aren’t really about the channel: the channel and her violence are two symptoms of the same cursed state – to wit, emotional damage.

In short: being an influencer is an act of deceit, and possibly self-deceit as well, hiding your essentially bad nature behind a smiling mask. If you carry anger from your own childhood it might be a triumphant revenge fantasy, but it doesn’t make influencers look like honest or stable people. 

Mind Body Spirit

Anya (Sarah J Bartholomew) has inherited a house from her long-lost grandmother. The grandma and her mother were estranged, but Anya and her mother don’t get on great either, so Anya moves across the country in an effort to find herself, starting an endearingly amateurish yoga channel to help her along. 

Unfortunately she also finds an old grimoire, and from here it’s basically a haunted-house-cum-possession movie. Bartholomew carries it all with an engaging performance, and it would have been better if it hadn’t tried to scramble about three different endings together; that’s our review part of the review for Mind Body Spirit.

A bit more spoiling to come, but I don’t think it’ll surprise you much. 

Anya is a nice person, but the film frames her as not really an influencer. The movie is sprinkled with fake ads for obviously more successful channels than her own, and they’re pure plastic-people fakery framed as everything Anya is not. 

The real meat for the grinder is her friend Kenzi, who runs an exercise channel and who talks about her ‘brand’, appropriates the customs of cultures she doesn’t belong to, and tells Anya ‘no one gives a shit about what you feel’ when it comes to content. In other words, she’s marked for death because she’s an archetypcal influencer fake – she even admits it at the end as if confessing her sins – and dies with as much audience sympathy as a classic horny teen. 

Anya is set in direct opposition to this: she’s emphatic that she’s doing this to explore her own Slavic heritage, and eventually yells at Kenzi that all her mock-Sanskrit business makes her a ‘coloniser’. 

There’s a better film that could have been made on that score, but the trouble is that they missed a trick: Anya herself is more of a coloniser than I think Mind Body Spirit realises. She may be trying to approach her own heritage – but she’s doing it with contemporary American influencer framing deadlocked onto her assumptions. Who else would look at a grimoire’s rituals and assume they must be a ‘journey of self-discovery’? 

Oscar Wilde famously quipped that, ‘Wordsworth went to the lakes, but he was never a lake poet. He found in stones the sermons he had already hidden there.’ Anya is looking to her heritage to provide her with the exact same thing that the fakey-fake influencers offer; she’s looking for Kenzi’s sermon in her grandma’s stone. It doesn’t occur to her that a different culture might not be interested in that spiritual-cleanse stuff. 

The framing doesn’t come across like it’s quite realised this. If the film had gone into that idea it could have been interesting, but regrettably all we get is that she’s a bit naïve, and hence innocent of everything.

In short: the only good influencer is an incidental influencer. 

Influencers who take it seriously as a business are deceivers and misappropriate the more authentic identities of other cultures. It’s only just at the end Kenzi unbends enough to talk about how ‘stressful’ it is to pretend she’s ‘perfect’ all the time. Kenzi in private is usually as dishonest as Kenzi in public, and it seems like career obsession has made her that way. 

The only sympathetic way to do it is as someone who’s on an authentic journey of discovery trying to connect with her own culture and family, and just happens to be filming it. Why, Anya doesn’t even bother to upload at first! 

Superhost

Claire (Sara Canning) and Teddy (Osric Chau) are two travel bloggers whose numbers are declining since the heydays of their ‘Bitch From Draper’ video, in which they so trashed an Airbnb host that her business and livelihood collapsed. They haven’t had a lolcow since, though, and Teddy at least prefers to keep it positive. Now their cheery little Airbnb review videos aren’t getting enough numbers to cover the bills, and things are about to get worse when they check in with Rebecca, the movie-crazy aspiring Superhost of the title. 

Rebecca is nuts, you guys, an exaggeration of every fear the extremely normal have of being stuck with a socially mis-tuned person – but she’s not an influencer, so let’s talk Claire and Teddy. They’re so different from each other that some archetypal bones are starting to show here:

Female influencers get so much more blame in these movies than male ones. 

Claire and Teddy are literally doing the same job, but Teddy is adorable and goofy and trying his best while Claire is the sort of person who gives him performance feedback like, ‘Cut the shit. That felt fake.’ Teddy is just more authentic than Claire; he’s really all about the relationship while she’s hard-nosed and hungry for success.

In an interview with Rue Morgue [https://rue-morgue.com/director-brandon-christensen-returns-with-superhost/], Superhost writer-director Brandon Christensen is pretty explicit on how he sees it:

When you put up something that people enjoy and it can go viral, which I assume is what happened when [Claire and Teddy] made the “Bitch from Draper” video, I think there’s this feeling of acceptance, and you just want to chase that high. It gives you this feeling like, “I’ve gotta get that again!” They probably made some good money and thought, “We’ve made it. We’re good now.” Then, all of a sudden, you start losing it and you start scrambling. It just becomes a singular focus for Claire where she wasn’t really putting the energy into her relationship at that point because I think she probably takes Teddy for granted a little bit.

There’s two things to notice there. 

First is the money aspect: Claire brings up in the dialogue that their income is falling to the point where they have to ask Teddy’s parents for rent money – and yet it’s the ‘feeling of acceptance’ that Christensen mentions first. To be fair he was responding to a question – but in it, the interviewer describes Claire as ‘obsessed with getting clicks and likes on her video channel to the point where it seems that she’s looking for something even more than just making the money she and Teddy need’, and Christensen affirms that framing. 

The second is the gender aspect: the relationship problems are 100% Claire’s fault. Superhost is not a good film to be a woman in. There are four characters: three female, all awful one way or another, and one male, who’s a great big sweetheart. All the women are grasping and ruthless; the one guy is a total innocent. 

In short: a male influencer might just be trying to make a living doing something fun, but a female influencer is strategic, destructive, cold-hearted and meat for the grinder. 

Influencer 

If you’ve seen Psycho (1960) and The Talented Mr Ripley (1999) you’ll know who this film’s parents are, but let’s go with it. Madison (Emily Tennant) is a pretty blonde influencer who’s on a trip to Thailand her boyfriend-producer Ryan (Rory J Saper) dropped out of at the last minute, leaving her all alone. 

(You can’t trust Englishmen in this film: there’s Ryan, who’s quite mean to her, and then there’s creepy middle-aged Rupert (Paul Spurrier), who hits on twenty-something Madison as she sits by herself at the bar. It’s a feature of American media that ‘English accent’ is an instant indicator that this is someone you can’t possibly have a lasting relationship with; my favourite ever example is the TV show Switched At Birth where a male character has got into a relationship with his English-accented neighbour, she’s very nice, and it all seems to be going great . . . but they felt the need to include a scene where she explains that she’s not actually English by birth, she was born in America, for no reason whatsoever except to allay the audience expectation that this woman must be going to let him down at some point.

I digress a little, but Influencer really leans on that assumption – which if nothing else is an indication of how thoughtfully it approaches character writing. We are in the world of types here, not psyches, and surface signifiers tend to be what they seem.) 

Abandoned by one English bastard and creeped on by another, the bastards, Madison is rescued by CW (Cassandra Naud), a bold and charming young American who takes her on a several-days adventure around a lot of scenic spots. 

Is CW all she seems? Of course not.

Okay, to discuss influencers properly in this film I have to spoil at least a bit. I don’t think it’s such a good movie it’s really worth staying unspoiled for – it might have been with better character writing, the plot itself had plenty of potential – but if you want to avoid, skip to the next section.

CW likes to kidnap influencers, abandon them to starve on a remote island, and then take over their channel using films of herself with their faces edited over hers. She preys on another influencer too (Sara Canning again, who either just has a very influencer-style face or an obscure filmic vendetta against influencers). Then Cassandra’s semi-ex-boyfriend Ryan turns up and attempts some detective work to figure out exactly what happened to Madison. 

Like Psycho, it hands off from protagonist to protagonist as the crimes continue. It’s a good idea; the trouble is that it’s one of those films where pretty much everybody is shallow and thinly-characterised so it’s hard to get invested in any of the handovers. 

CW is a clear descendent of Minghella’s Tom Ripley if not Patricia Highsmith’s, inveigling her way into the lives and identities of influencers – but unlike Minghella’s Tom, there’s no clear reason why she’d be doing this. Ryan accuses her of doing it because she wants people to like her, but she’s charismatic and socially skilled enough that her supposed envy doesn’t seem very well founded. (Unlike the Tom Ripley of that film, who’s a working-class gay kid who stumbles into the lives of the untouchable 1%, tells a couple of lies to sustain a fantasy, and then can’t bear to give up that fantasy no matter what the cost. Tom is very shy unless he’s pretending to be someone else, but CW’s a good talker.) 

What does CW have to be insecure about? All we can guess is that she has a birthmark on her face. It’s real: Cassandra Naud was born with a nevus, and it’s good to see her getting filmed as the beauty she is. But is this reason for CW to be insecure? Apparently Naud herself was bullied as a child, and I’m glad to see her show the world what’s what – but the film doesn’t give us anything like that. Before he gets suspicious of her Ryan points out that she’s a charismatic presence who could succeed as an influencer, and the only reference he makes is to tell her that her look is ‘unique’. 

Nobody is the least bit unpleasant about it; if she does feel insecure, the film doesn’t give her any justification unless we take it for granted that any facial atypicality must be bad. (In which case they should have found a less pretty actress.) It simply isn’t scripted and shot like a proper explanation. She looks fabulous and the film treats her as such. 

So what this leaves us with is the feeling that she is, to some extent, speaking the slasher heart of the film’s theme when she tells Madison, ‘Nobody actually cares. You feel entitled to thinking that people should follow you, which makes you believe that you’re the centre of the universe, the star of the story. But no one is.’ 

The film definitely plays in a fun way with the idea that no one’s the star, but it does very little to suggest that a hunger for attention is a bigger motivator in the influencer industry than, say, money. We see almost no time spent on such boring business aspects as editing and admin, and issues like sponsorship are only glanced at. We’re surrounded by luxuries and I’m not how they’re paying for them. CW may be the villain, but every narrative of influencer success Ryan recounts is of someone who posted innocently, blew up, and then got their heads turned.  

In short: We have a male influencer or influencer-adjacent character in Ryan, but he doesn’t film himself, just other people. The film feels indecisive about how it treats him – bad boyfriend in one scene, righteous detective in another – but he’s definitely not the real problem.

Madison is salvageable because the videos weren’t her idea and she modestly demurred when Ryan first suggested the idea. She agreed because it was a way to date him, which is a more acceptable motivation than wanting to be rich and famous. But then her channel took off, and so the relationship foundered. Madison’s success has drained his joy and her authenticity. 

As with every film that features a male influencer, the monster is female. CW, this film’s monster, is driven entirely by a hunger for validation and a willingness to be fake to get it. 

Deadstream

I’ve already done a brief review of Deadstream on this very site [link https://gnofhorror.com/deadstream-2022-directed-by-joseph-winter-and-vanessa-winter/], so I’ll just hit the main points.

The influencer is extravagantly male. Shawn Ruddy (Joseph Winter) is a bro-ish YouTuber spending a night in a haunted house in a desperate attempt to revive his career after disgracing himself in some unspecified but easily-guessable way. As Logan Paul put it not-very-penitently after the Aokigahara incident, Shawn evidently made a ‘severe and continuous lapse in his judgement’. 

Whatever it was, it got him cancelled, demonetised and arrested. Now he’s back, but he’s on his last chance. And while he’s trying, he clearly hasn’t altogether learned better: he’s still kind of an insensitive douche. 

In short: Shawn is an influencer and we judge him – but we don’t judge him for just being an influencer. In the course of his work, he did something seriously wrong. We can think of real-world examples of such ‘somethings’ and they’re pretty loathsome.

He’s also stupid enough to film in a haunted house rather than the more normal locations of the female influences on this list, so in genre terms he asks for trouble way more than just filming himself. 

The monster is female. 

Spree

This isn’t on Shudder, but it was on Amazon Prime and several people recommended it. 

Kurt Kunkle (Joe Keery) isn’t a successful influencer – he streams, but his viewership is barely into double-digits. But he wants to be. He’s so desperate, in fact, that he starts murdering people as he drives around at his rideshare job, livestreaming the results.

In dark comedy style, this doesn’t work as well as he hopes, at least not at first. Several murders in and he still hasn’t gone viral because nobody was watching in the first place. As tends to happen in the real world, he has to capitalise on the followings of other more successful online personalities to get anywhere. 

The hero of this movie is Jessie (Sasheer Zamata), a no-nonsense comedienne he picks up and spares on an early ride, then stalks because he envies her audience, and who eventually takes him down and gets even more famous herself as a result. 

Jessie isn’t really an influencer, though.

She’s a comic, and when Kurt asks what the secret is to her 200k-strong follower count, she said bluntly that it’s because she’s funny.

Jessie, then, is the kind of Internet famous a scriptwriter can relate to: she makes art, and her follower count is a symptom of the art’s success, not her success as a self-marketer. She livestreams, sure, but that’s to a fanbase she earned by legit means. 

Kurt, on the other hand, is an antihero-cum-monster – and he’s all about getting the follows. 

This is the only male example I could find of the pure shallow attention-hound character – but there’s a bit more to say about that. 

Kurt is vapid and validation-hungry, sure. But like Shawn in Deadstream, he’s also a literal criminal. He isn’t just shallow, vain and more interested in his follower count than in his manners. He goes around killing people.

Kurt, in fact, strikes me as an older type of movie monster: one from the 1990s. There are earlier examples, but they’re less about fame for fame’s sake; Martin Scorcese’s 1982 The King of Comedy features Robert de Niro as Rupert Pupkin, for instance, an obsessed fan who kidnaps a talk show host – but he’s really a would-be comedian and wants a spot for his stand-up, not just to be famous for nothing in particular. He’s more an aspiring Jessie than an active Kurt. 

Once the 90s got going it was a bit different. ‘If you’re not documenting yourself, it’s simple: you just don’t exist,’ Kurt says as livestreams his murders. Compare that to Suzanne Stone (Nicole Kidman) in To Die For (1995) declaring soberly, ‘You’re not anybody in America if you’re not on TV . . . Because what’s the point of doing anything worthwhile if nobody’s watching? If people are watching, it makes you a better person.’ She believes this, so she arranges a hit on her husband for not supporting her career as a local TV weathergirl. 

Or consider one of the murderers of Scream 2 (1997) boasting that he’s looking forward to the media circus after he’s caught because, ‘These days it’s all about the trial.’ (‘These days’ were the era of the rolling-coverage 1995 trial of OJ Simpson and the 1993-4 trial of the Mendendez brothers, for those two young to know. 24-hour television was relatively new and prefigured what the Internet would become.)

Think of the French mockumentary Man Bites Dog (1992), in which a camera crew follows a serial killer as he goes about his business. Consider even Natural Born Killers (1994), in which spree killers picking up a fandom is a big part of the story. There were a lot of those movies back in that decade. The Internet was always going to happen and they could hear it coming.

In short: Spree really seems like an early wave of the famous 30-year nostalgia cycle. It’s getting its nostalgia on for 90s movies and reimagining the same story – media-savvy murderer playing crimes for attention – with the technology updated to present times. It didn’t feel like it was about influencers per se, but more about violent fame-chasers, using modern means to tell a much older story. 

Add to that the film ends with noting that in the murkier corners of the Internet people are already speculating about who’ll be ‘the next Kurt Kunkle’ (along with the implication that this whole movie was made by a Kurt fan from downloaded clips) . . . and I think in terms of cultural position nowadays he’s less like an influencer and more like a school shooter.

Nobody but Ben Shapiro has the bad taste to make school-set films about an ongoing epidemic of civil massacres. But horror does like to talk about crises in oblique ways, so Spree found a pretty clever way to talk about the problem of attention-hungry, murderous dorks. 

Kudos for that – but it does make it less of a film about influencers than it might seem on the face of it. If anything it puts Kurt in the same category as Anya, albeit accidentally: if he’s really more about the murders than the streaming, then he’s only an incidental influencer. That may sound odd – being an influencer is his entire stated motivation – but what I mean is that the kind of cultural figure he most evokes is someone who doesn’t usually stream. Diegetically Kurt’s all about the videos, but on the symbolic level he rings different bells.

In terms of gender and influencers: it has a good female influencer of sorts, but as with Mind Body Spirit, she’s only an influencer as a byproduct of something more authentic. The male influencer is bad, but he has to go from vapidity to actual crime to end up in that category – and in terms of the social issues he addresses, streaming isn’t really the subject as much as it might seem.

Cam

. . . is really, really good. It’s on Netflix rather than Shudder, but if you have Shudder you probably have Netflix and I sat through six bad-to-mid movies and after all that I refuse not to talk about Cam. I’ll get there later. It’ll be our palate-cleanser. 

So till that happy moment, let’s talk about a pattern you might be seeing emerge.

Is anyone starting to feel like ‘women are shallow bitches’ is a bit of an undertow in these movies? 

Men can be bad influencers, sure, but they have to do actual bad things to get there. Women are bad because they’re influencers. 

The only way off the hook is for women to be influencers as a side-effect of something more meaningful. If influencing is the whole point, that’s all they have to do to be condemned.

Let’s talk about sin.

A question to start with: why did sexually active teenagers get stabbed so much back in the day? 

The common answer is that it’s a punishment for sin. In sexually Puritanical America, this was a dire warning: don’t have sex, children, it’ll lead to doom.

That’s all very well, but here’s the thing: the primary audience of such slashers were teenagers themselves, and however they act in the movies, real teenagers aren’t stupid. They’re very quick at spotting when they’re being sermonised, and there’s nothing they hate more. 

So why would they flock to movies doing just that?

No, I don’t think it was about punishing sin. I think the punishment for sin was, at best, a fig-leaf. 

There’s a very good video essay by YouTuber Natalie Wynn on the Twilight books and movies [link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqloPw5wp48], and one of the things she discusses at length is the function of disavowal. Discussing Nancy Friday’s book on women’s sexual fantasies, My Secret Garden, Wynn defines disavowal thus:

We can call this disavowal, the process of constructing fantasy situations where your desires are gratified without having to assert or even having to acknowledge the desire. 

And isn’t horror a marvellous machine for disavowing? Nobody literally wants to be stabbed with a knife or whatever else happens in a murder-movie, but boy do we watch those movies anyway. There’s some other kind of emotional gratification going on. 

In the horny-teens-get-killed movies, the target demographic was young men. What did they get out of this supposedly Puritanical message? What was behind the ‘sex is naughty’ disavowal? Let’s start with something basic . . .

I say this with genuine respect for teenage boys. I think teenage boys are pretty great.

But they’re people, and people are messy. 

These particular people are a flavour of messy that’s young and confused and full of feelings too big to handle; we all are at that age. And for a heterosexual teenage boy, I think there’s definitely a period in life where you aren’t sure if you want to fuck a girl or kill a girl.

I mean, there she is, going around all desirable. But she’s also scary because she could crush you in a humiliating instant, either by being mean to you or even by offering you sex that you find yourself too nervous or too inexperienced to do right. She carries the prospect of pleasure, and also of self-esteem – not just pride in yourself, but because other guys your age would be impressed with you if you could just get your hands on her, and because if you’re a virgin that’s horribly embarrassing. (Any virgins reading this, please note: you’re fine, don’t be embarrassed. It’s not that difficult.) 

That beautiful girl could relieve you of those awful feelings, but she has the power not to – and most of the time she doesn’t. And sometimes she even goes and bestows that desperately-craved relief on some other guy, and he surely doesn’t deserve it, and there’s a part of you that wants to see him killed too, right?

Horny teens getting killed gratifies both conflicting desires at once.

You get a good look at her lovely body in sexual action. Then you get to see a figure you can disavow do to her what the most secret, angry and shameful part of you wants, and you can disavow that too. You can watch girls suffer, and you can sympathise and spectate and none of it is your fault because you’re rooting for the murderer to be stopped at the end, and if you’re a horny teen boy yourself then that’s a lot of conflicting feelings addressed.

(Note: I ran this by my Consultant Man, ie my husband, who said he thought it was ‘uncomfortable but fair’. I’m not trying to slander the sex here. Men are nice for the most part; it’s just that even nice people are full of feelings.

And to be clear, I’m not saying only teen boys have secret and mixed-up desires. The whole Twilight video I just quoted is exactly about the secret and mixed-up desires of girls, and there’s plenty more to say on top of that. Teen girls like watching beautiful boys suffer every bit as much as vice versa, for a start; it’s probably more mocked, but it’s just as common. Maybe I’ll find an essay about it somewhere down the line; till then I’ll just say that there’s probably also a reason why so many YA heroines are singers – you’re so full of emotion you could do with a good scream, but you want to sound good doing it.) 

Anyway, that’s the theory I’m starting with about horny teens in slashers. Punishment for sin is the disavowal; lust, fear, shame, and the anger that comes from mixing the three are the real emotions.

And then there’s the Men, Women and Chain Saws perspective.

In case that sounds unfamiliar, a quick intro. Have you heard of the Final Girl?

If so, you have academic Carol J Clover to thank. Her seminal book, Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender In The Modern Horror Film was first published in 1992. She didn’t just talk about slashers but about possession and exorcism movies, rape-revenge movies and movies playing with the concept of voyeurism, and she had a great deal to say about all of them. 

But she did sort of write the book on slashers, so I figured that as long as I was talking about slashers, I should read it. 

Here’s the first fun fact: while she created the phrase ‘Final Girl’, Clover was politely exasperated about what happened next:

The fate of [the Final Girl] trope since [publication] has largely determined, for better or worse, the intellectual and more broadly cultural trajectory of the book itself. I say ‘for worse’ not because of the Final Girl’s appropriations in rock and rap music, novels, plays, films, and the like, but because, in the course of that history, she has eclipsed other figures and issues in the book and, more to the point, has in her wanderings become a rough sketch of her former self.

Detached from her low-budget origins and messier meanings, she now circulates in these mostly cleaner and more up-scale venues as a ‘female avenger,’ ‘triumphant feminist hero,’ and the like. This is not to discount some striking reworkings and cogent reviews, only to point out that in much of the wider discourse, the sketch version more or less hijacked not only the character of the Final Girl but the chapter in which she figures, and indeed the book as a whole, which is not infrequently referred to as one about slasher movies and their feminist heroes.

(Quoted from the introduction to the new edition. If you’re not familiar with academics, that is the sound of an academic who’s really quite annoyed. I can’t blame her; in the original book Clover wrote that calling the Final Girl feminist was ‘a particularly grotesque form of wishful thinking.’)other things, her refusal to have sex with men, as well as a less feminine presentation than her murdered peers.) 

And so it is with the rest of Clover’s book – which she’s quite right, covers a great deal more ground. She finds many ways in which male emotions are expressed upon and through female bodies. Her argument isn’t that slashers offer clear heroes and villains, but that they offer outlets for passionately mixed feelings in which the presumed male audience can occupy multiple positions at once. 

Clover doesn’t talk very much about the girls who die before the Final Girl, but she doesn’t question that they’re there to suffer and be killed. That pretty much goes without saying. And she notes that while young men get killed too, their sufferings are filmed in a much less lingering way. 

How do influencers stack up against this?

I watched Influencer with my husband, who unlike me is a heterosexual man with an inside scoop on the male gaze. There’s a scene where CW takes a shower, and being a film that has definite homage to Psycho in its purview – in particular the fact that it hands over from one protagonist to another to another as the crimes and investigations proceed – it’s fair to assume that Hitchcock’s infamous shower scene was in mind. 

Women get killed in the shower in movies. There’s a convenience to it on two levels: diegetically it’s a place where they’re vulnerable, and for the audience it means the lads out there can get a nice look at her pretty pelt before some bastard cuts it up. Good old disavowal.

But my husband observed this: in Influencer it didn’t feel like a sexual shower. Influencer, he said, struck him as glossy like an advert, and when our antiheroine gets in the shower to wash off some blood, she doesn’t look like a piece of soft porn so much as like another piece of lifestyle porn. 

The same thing happens when she takes over Madison’s luxury house: she’s in a skimpy swimsuit, but the camera doesn’t lust at her – it lusts at the many expensive items the house contains. 

But it was, to nick his phrase, ‘the exact same erotics.’ She’s a high-class object taking its place in a surrounding full of other high-class objects, placed there for viewing consumption. 

Because here’s something influencers have in common with naked teenage girls: films can frame them as temptresses.

A slasher victim may be a tease or she may just be a compliant partner, but since it’s not the audience member she’s hopping into bed with she’s a temptress for him: literally, he can look but he can’t touch. 

Add to that our culture’s idea that women tempt men simply by being attractive, and a target demographic too young to have had very long to ask themselves whether that’s fair, and that’s a temptress’s power. In both the literal and the symbolic sense, the slashed girl gets what she was asking for. 

Not very nice, and not the whole story, but certainly effective. 

But here’s the thing about influencers: you can cast them as modern-day temptresses.

After all, aren’t they flaunting more than their lovely physiques? Don’t they flaunt their luxurious lifestyles, making you want to be like them when you know you never can be? Including because part of you suspects even they aren’t like that off-camera, and yet here they are encouraging you to want the impossible? 

Because boy do we get a lot of lifestyle porn in these movies. Influencer is just one luxury location and breathtaking vista after another. Rebecca’s Airbnb in Superhost is gorgeous. If you inherited the house in Mind Body Spirit you’d be over the moon. The women of Sissy are extremely fashionable. As with the bodies of slasher victims, we get a really nice look at all this stuff before we disavow it.

More than that, though – aren’t influencers offering a kind of social temptation?

By now the Internet has talked a lot about parasocial relationships – that is, one-sided relationships in which an audience member feels like they ‘know’ a public figure who, for their part, has no notion the audience member exists. It’s a kind of cognitive dissonance that’s uncomfortable if it gets too powerful, and can lead audience members to ping in all sorts of undesirable directions. 

But it’s also the bread and butter of influencers. If your audience doesn’t feel some kind of emotional connection to you, why would they like, share, subscribe and all the other things that pay your rent? A great deal of the influencer’s job is a kind of parasocial farming: they need to create a brand, which is to say a consistent public persona that people will want to stay engaged with. 

And nobody wants to be farmed. If you’re sensible then you understand how it works and take it or leave it according to your own power. But the emotional brain isn’t always sensible, and I think there’s often a tickle of resentment in there: this person is making me care with no intention of reciprocating, and that doesn’t feel fair. 

So much of the bad influencer stereotype in horror is of someone selfish. They care about clicks; they don’t care about the people around them. 

Isn’t that a kind of enactment of the viewer’s resentment: you care about me as a click, but you don’t care about me?

It’s not very surprising this would get attached to female influencers more than male. Men are generally held to lower standards when it comes to emotional caretaking. There are plenty of caring men out there, but it’s seen as an extra to be rewarded, not as an essential that a woman gets punished if she fails to deliver. 

Authenticity versus fakery comes up over and over in these movies. Online content creators had been talking about the problem this created for them years before most of these movies came out; Lindsey Ellis’s popular video essay ‘Manufacturing Authenticity (For Fun and Profit)’ [link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FJEtCvb2Kw] came out in 2018. 

In it Ellis talks seriously about how in the entertainment business, ‘sincerity and authenticity are the valuable commodities,’ and she discusses the burden of emotional labour this lays on professional content creators. ‘Over time,’ she observes, ‘little tiny microtraumas can build up as a result of a person that does not reflect their emotional truth, but more importantly that their livelihood depends on.’ 

The emphasis is mine – because these horror movies de-emphasise it for all they’re worth. The issue of livelihood is very hazily sketched in, if it’s in the plot at all. Instead they focus on the absence of emotional truth these female influencers display. 

Male influencers, if anything, are showing too much emotional truth: Kurt’s neediness and violence are on lavish display, while Shawn got in trouble because he failed to control his character flaws. They’re just too unfiltered, too real, you know?

But the women? If there’s any discrepancy between their persona and their private self – especially if they seem relaxed on camera but businesslike off it – then that’s the real sin. It may feel like identifying the problem of emotional disconnect, but it ignores the central reason for the disconnect that Ellis, who was speaking from personal experience, identified. 

These films do very little with financial worries. The most we see is Claire and Teddy worrying about rent, and even they don’t really talk about what this means for them in the future. 

Instead these movies are straight-up examples of the problem Ellis began with: influencers are expected to be authentic even when nobody can be their full self in any performance – and when they can’t be, the movies blame the influencers. 

(It’s probably worth noting here that Ellis herself fell victim to this. She no longer posts on YouTube except very occasionally, having fled to the better-regulated subscription channel Nebula. This was precisely because she was harassed for perceived discrepancies between her public persona and her supposed ‘mask off’ self – the latter adding up to little more than having made the odd insensitive or poorly-phrased remark over a long career, a ‘sin’ that very few people couldn’t be judged for if they produced that much content from that young an age. Demanding ‘authenticity’ can quickly turn vicious. It was also observed by Ellis as well as others that her male colleagues did not experience this viciousness to anything like the degree she and her female colleagues routinely did.)

‘All content is cultivated,’ as Ellis tried to explain. But for female influencers in these films, that’s exactly what the movies don’t like. And there doesn’t seem to be any solution except to stop streaming, either voluntarily or because you’re too dead to continue – which I guess at least makes the livelihood issue go away.

It’s a simple temptress archetype. The influencer girl is warm-skinned but cold-hearted. She smiles but she doesn’t love you. She’s a tease. She’s asking for it.

And we could stop there. But let’s bring in the Clover perspective.

Let’s start with her most famous concept, the Final Girl and her more feminine fellow-victims. (With apologies to Clover and a suggestion that you really do read the rest of the book.) This is one of her figures that crosses gender boundaries. 

Clover notes that the Final Girl is androgynous not only because she doesn’t sleep with boys, often has a gender-neutral name like Laurie or Stretch, and often defends herself with traditionally phallic weapons (Clover is in dialogue with Freud in this book), but because, ‘At the level of the cinematic apparatus, her unfemininity is signalled by her exercise of the “active investigating gaze” normally reserved for males and punished in females when they assume it themselves.’ 

She doesn’t give examples of that punishment, to my regret, but I think most women can think of times they’ve drawn hostility simply for acting as if they’re entitled to ask questions and assert opinions, and in slashers the other girls tend to function as Bluebeard’s earlier wives if they do any exploring: you looked behind the forbidden door, and now you die for it. 

But I think we see something similar in these influencer characters – only it’s success-seeking rather than investigating. 

A man has to do something else to be bad: Kurt is a murderer, Shawn did something that got him arrested as well as demonetised; even Ryan is emotionally abusive to Madison and physically violent to CW, and he’s not really an influencer. If a man is just a professional influencer then he’s Teddy, a sweet guy contentedly getting by but really more interested in marrying his girlfriend. (It won’t shock you to hear she kind of breaks his heart when he tries. He proposes sincerely, she thinks it’s a bit for the camera; that’s your gender relations there.)

But for women, actively investigating how to advance themselves and pursuing it is a step into Bluebeard’s lair. They’ll only be forgiven by the camera – if not necessarily spared from their fate – if they’re virginal about it: if they’re a Jessie or an Anya, not really hot for the clicks. 

Influencer horror definitely has virgins. They may not survive, but they’re at least spared judgement. But professionally-minded influencers get punished.

But Clover was clearly frustrated that this was the only part of her book people talk about, so let’s get into the meat of it. (So to speak.) 

Let’s discuss something she addresses in the last chapter, ‘The Eye of Horror’. This is where she talks about eyes, both as literal organs and as a figurative gaze, as an important part of many horror movies: ‘Horror privileges eyes because, more crucially than any other kind of cinema, it is about eyes.’ It’s about the act of looking, which can make you vulnerable or complicit or outright guilty, depending on how you do it and what film you do it in.

No movie I’ve covered here explicitly says as much, but I can’t help wondering if there’s a degree of territorial bristling towards influencers. 

They are, after all, making media that people consume, and since there are only so many leisure hours to go around, often they’re consuming influencer media when they might otherwise have been watching a movie. (Or reading a novel, the scamps.) 

We’re all competing for a share of the eyeballs, and it can be frustrating to feel that after all the passion and skill you put into making a work of art, you’re going to be beaten out by some ditz on a beach talking about spiritual tourism – which is the kind of uncharitable imagining you can resort to when you’re feeling salty about capitalism and blaming the players rather than the game. 

But here’s something interesting about influencers on-screen: they’re filmmakers who aren’t filmmakers.

They’re making something, all right. But it’s not a movie. It provides interesting visuals for a filmmaker to deploy – but it also positions them as a kind of competitor to the director. 

Clover says this:

Susan Sontag found in Peeping Tom[1960, a movie so controversial it pretty much killed Michael Powell’s career] a perfect vindication of her view that the act of photography is an act of power, aggression, predatoriness, and sexual voyeurism . . . [but in Clover’s opinion] assaultive gazing, associated with the camera, is one thing and reactive gazing, associated with the projected screenings, quite another.

Clover’s thesis is that horror viewing can be sadistic and masochistic, assaultive and victimised, all at once. ‘As slasher is to slashed,’ she says, ‘horror filmmakers are to horror audiences.’ The relationship is one she calls ‘essentially adversarial.’

But who is the cameraman in these movies – or more often the camerawoman, because these influencers are usually filming themselves? (To a degree actually improbable for a successful channel, which would probably have a team – a very significant choice.) 

What if she is also the first viewer? 

Because influencers don’t just film: they edit and upload. If they’re filming on a phone they can literally film and watch themselves at the same time. Influencer even includes a moment where the heroine reminds the middle-aged lecher Rupert – and with him, the audience – that she doesn’t need anyone looking at her through the camera. She’s already her own spectator. 

Through Clover’s lens, these women are engaged in a kind of auto-predation. They are aggressing upon themselves. They are their own victims. 

They are their own adversaries.

We don’t see that with the male influencers so much. Teddy gets bossed around by Claire, the obvious director of the couple: he’s more like the (traditionally coded) feminine subject to her masculine gaze, and look how that works out for them. 

But Shawn and Kurt can’t be seen as preying on themselves because they so clearly have done harm to other people. And in both cases an external figure, ghostly for Shawn, human for Kurt, female in both cases – finally steps in to dispatch them. Any predation they do to themselves takes a distant second or third place. 

But the girls? 

Claire has lost touch with her feminine side and become an unhappy harridan. Then another less-put-together woman kills her.

Madison is a lost soul as long as she’s too focused on her channel. Then another woman tries to kill her to steal her channel.

Anya is trying to ‘find herself’, and she’s using a camera to look. In the process, she opens herself up to another demonic female who wants to take what Anya has. 

Cecilia is trying to transform herself but can’t. The camera is all about shaping herself to fit her own gaze, and she turns savage when that control is disrupted – by other women. She differs from the others movies’ protagonists in her violence, but only because the other heroines are the targets of envious women, while Cecilia is the envious woman. It’s the same story with the camera in different hands.

‘You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman,’ wrote Margaret Atwood in The Robber Bride. ‘You are your own voyeur.’

But whatever the gender of the camera’s gaze, diegetically it’s the envious gaze of a female force that brings the real danger here. 

These are women who want to watch themselves being watched, and they get watched to death by other women. Men are incidental. 

I’ll go a little further. In Ways of Seeing, John Berger famously lambasted advertising for playing on the cultivated envy of its marks:

The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product. She is meant to imagine herself transformed by the product into an object of envy for others, an envy which will then justify her loving herself. One could put this another way: the publicity image steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product.

Female-made influencer videos of the kind parodied in these films are stories of women transforming themselves into enviable objects so that they can embody the enviable image that justifies them loving themselves. But the price is the emotional connection so essential for approved femininity: ‘Being envied,’ as Berger observes, ‘is a solitary form of reassurance.’

This is an old story. Berger also gets pretty caustic about attributing blame to women in artistic depictions:

The mirror was often used as a symbol of the vanity of woman. The moralizing, however, was mostly hypocritical. You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, you put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting ‘Vanity’, thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure.

I want to be clear that I’m not trying to shame anyone for enjoying sexy images when I quote this. Sexuality is a huge and delightful part of the human experience and has been a driving force behind some marvellous art; I mean, that Perrault painting is very pretty even if it is needlessly insulting in its title. Call it ‘Too Right, You Do Look Fantastic’ and you’ll hear no complaining from me. We are not here to judge anyone who loves looking at a woman in the altogether as long as he’s polite about it. 

But while the concept of the influencer is a new trend, I’m getting increasingly disappointed to see what a creaky set of stereotypes it relies upon. 

In the hands of fictional women the mirror has become a camera – but because this is horror, gazing is assaultive. And she’s directing that destructive gaze at her own image. 

The woman influencer is, in effect, killing her real self – and that makes her vulnerable to real killers.

And the real killers are more envious women. 

The victim creates the gaze and it consumes her, and it’s all done by female misdeeds

As it goes by in a flash too fast for our conscious mind to fully process it, we also pick up that it also looks like an abyss, a gazing eye, and pretty darn vaginal.

That’s a lot to put on a girl for being happy people liked something she made. [end caption]

I guess you could make an argument about how the destructive force is really the female drive for impossible perfection that no real woman can follow without getting destroyed – I’m not saying you couldn’t make a movie about that – but honestly these movies are not that movie. I got more of the vibe Clover talks about in her chapter ‘Getting Even’ on rape-revenge movies: ‘If women are as capable as men of acts of humiliating violence, men are off the guilt hook that modern feminism has put them on.’ 

If women do all the self-objectifying, the guys can relax.

Ryan is a bad boyfriend, but CW is way worse than him, and in the end it’s women who control the violence and mastermind the plots. Teddy doesn’t have anything to suggest about the couple’s financial problems, but it’s Claire who’s the brains of the business and Rebecca the monster that finishes it. 

This is a motif we see creeping into quite a lot of horror these days: Men are just weak, but women are crazy.

I’m just going to do a little survey of who’s holding the real cameras here. 

Influencer was directed by a man, Kurtis David Harder, and scripted by two men, Harder and Tesh Guttikonda.

Mind Body Spirit was directed by two men, Alex Heynes and Matthew Merenda, and scripted by three men, Heynes, Merenda and Topher Hendricks. 

Superhost was written and directed by a man, Brandon Christensen.

(Oh, and while we’re at it, Spree had an all male writer-director team, Deadstream was made by a husband-wife team, and Cam had a male director collaborating with two female co-writers. None of them have a female influencer lead except Cam, which we’ll get to, but just in case you were wondering.) 

Sissy is the only one of the four female-centric films with a woman in any creative lead role, but she was still collaborating with a man: it was written and directed by Hannah Barlow and Kane Senes. 

It’s perhaps for this reason that Sissy is the only one that bothers to give the female protagonist a reason for wanting this attention except the assumption that you get hooked on validation. Cecilia may be a validation addict, but at least she has a backstory to explain why. It’s a pretty sad backstory – in the real world it’d be nice to believe that troubled children can turn themselves into well-adjusted adults – but we do see, if nothing else, that Cecilia has suffered unusual damage to her self-esteem and hence might be unusually driven to shore it up.

Every other film assumes that the love of attention is reason enough. For a woman, at least.

To be fair it applies to Kurt in Spree too, but he isn’t auto-cannibalising himself. He has to do more than just want attention to be seen as fallen from grace. 

And like Shawn in Deadstream, he is at least doing what the kids used to call an ‘effort post’. Shawn and Kurt go out of their way to create content that has a story. 

With the male influencers, the plot comes from what they do on-camera. Kurt murders; Shawn gets chased by a ghost; that’s the story. Who they are drives the story, and who they are on camera is who they are off. Even Ryan, negging hipster though he is, we see as a producer-photographer rather than a fame-seeker; it’s his promotion that created Madison’s career, which is what starts the story going. Like Kurt and Shawn, when he holds a camera he directs the events. 

With the female influencers, the plot happens behind the scenes. 

Cecilia is gentle on-camera and violent off; Claire is bubbly on-camera and shrewish off; Madison is blissful on-camera and unhappy off, and CW is an outright fraud; Anya on-camera just wanted to do yoga and reconnect to her roots, but an analog old witch – in a hardback book, no less – upended her plans. If they’d just made the videos they’d been planning to make, there would be no movie. The closest any of them comes to trying to create an on-camera story is Claire looking for ‘crazy people’ to film, and boy does that get her killed first. 

The men are creating the story and filming it as they go, and the movie lasts as long as they do. 

The story tends to happen to the women and the camera usually conceals what’s really going on – or in the case of Mind Body Spirit, only captures it incidentally.

On camera, the women sell a vibe in which you ‘just be’. The men do.

The female influencers are influencers. The male influencers are filmmakers.

In these movies the male filmmaker is about the content, however recklessly he pursues it; the female influencer is about the clicks. Clover remarks that, ‘A remarkably durable theme of horror involves turning the assaultive gaze back on itself,’ but in 1992 she was writing about voyeurs getting sucked in to some vampiric vaginal void or other, or else having vengeance wrought upon their literal eyes. In these movies, the assaultive gaze arrives pre-turned – but only if it comes from the eyes of a woman. 

These women shouldn’t have meddled with a camera. They don’t know what they’re doing. Those amateurs should get out of the business before they do themselves a mischief. 

But okay, let’s try to find some charity in this. Clover’s thesis is that part of the function of horror is to allow viewers to assume a flexible mental identity. If you can do that, you can suffer vicariously alongside characters you wouldn’t normally see yourself in. The dynamic isn’t purely sadistic; it’s sadomasochistic with a strong masochistic streak.

So . . .

How different are you from an influencer really? Can you not identify just a bit?

Be honest: are your own social media posts always completely authentic? Do you never curate based on what would be well received, or what fits the particular face you’re showing to the world?

Don’t you want people to like you?

I mean, I curate. I’ve had periods where I’ve been struggling with depression and PTSD and my Bluesky posts were as chirpy and whimsical as always. I have a chirpy and whimsical side, don’t get me wrong; I couldn’t sustain the tone if I didn’t. But I also have books to promote, which means staying visible, and it’s easier to produce a lot of posts if I have my tone pre-picked. Also my Bluesky followers include a lot of people I don’t know, and while I might like them if I met them, posting ‘Hey I’m in bad mental health’ is not something I’m comfortable doing with strangers. 

So sometimes I put on a cheery tone not because I’m cheery but because I’m a writer and managing tone is a skill I’ve cultivated, and I feed the content maw because that’s what you have to do. A movie murderer could absolutely call me fake for it. I do it because I’m seeking success – and I’m a woman at that, so I guess just pass me the knife and let’s get this over with.

But have you never done something a bit like that? Even if you haven’t done it on social media, have you never smiled at your boss when you wanted to spit? Have you never exaggerated a story just a little bit to make yourself sound funnier or cooler? Humans are social animals, but socialising isn’t telepathy, it’s performance. 

And I suspect a lot of us feel just a little guilty about that. 

It would be really lovely to feel we were above it all, wouldn’t it? Especially if we didn’t end up isolated as a result.

Well, we don’t post, like, lifestyle vlogs at least. I mean maybe we do, but I suspect the overlap beween horror fans and wellness influencer fans is not so huge that it’d put off a filmmaker. 

I think one function of the influencer is to be a scapegoat, punished for the sins of the Internet age we all bear to some extent. 

But I think she also expresses a longing for freedom. 

We don’t see it in all these movies – Cecilia occupies the CW/Rebecca role instead, and Deadstream shifts into pure haunted-house antics towards the end. But there’s something else running through most of them. There will have to be some serious spoilers in this section . . .

Influencer ends with Madison having miraculously survived her marooning, settling CW’s hash and taking CW’s boat back to the mainland. (‘You bitch!’ she hisses over CW’s prone body before delivering the coup de grâce, and the space and weight given to the line suggests the gleeful relief of a movie that’s spent the last 87 minutes absolutely desperate to say that to some woman somewhere.) 

It would be the easiest thing in the world to show a Sissy or Spree ending, Madison packaging and monetising her ordeal for clicks. But we don’t see that. Madison ends as a Final Girl – and like a Final Girl, she has deftly occupied the sweet spot: enough like our validation-craving selves that we can identify with her vulnerable side, but enough like our non-influencer selves that we don’t feel too uncomfortable putting ourselves in her shoes. 

Where does that leave her? Alive on the open ocean, survival the only thing that matters, finally free of seeking it in anything but the most direct, primal, analog of ways. 

She can stop scrambling for online success. That’s a win. 

Mind Body Spirit ends with a rather muddled plot; it feels as if they could think of about three climactic final scenes and tried to do all of them. (Which is a pity; it could have been a decent little movie if it had gone all-in on just one of them.) But the common thread is this: the pre-Internet culture from which influencers draw, be it Asian yoga or Slavic witchcraft, is where the real power lies. 

Getting possessed by an evil ghost might not be ideal – but it does let Anya win the influencer game on influencer terms. 

I mentioned above that Anya reproaches the ‘coloniser’ mindset of people who ‘consume other people’s cultures’ and pretend to be deep because they’ve found a way to sell some foreign gimmick they’ve picked up . . . but at the same time, she doesn’t question their basic assumption: that the highest value to be found in every culture is personal self-development. Whatever her roots, American individualism rules her thinking. 

She’s not exploring her grandma’s grimoire with open curiosity; she’s looking to it to provide her the exact same ‘journey of self-discovery’ that every influencer out there is peddling.

Isn’t Anya doing the exact same thing as the gimmick-sellers – only hers is the best? 

In Mind Body Spirit, every influencer works by selling some piece of ancient wisdom. So does Anya – but she’s special because she has a right to it. She didn’t have to hustle to get it; it was bequeathed to her by her grandmother. Decorum and disavowal are built right in. She gets the ‘real’ spiritual inside scoop without having to grind or compromise, or even having to choose for herself what it’s going to be. 

Here we see the Final Girl’s double play again. Anya, like us, is just about wanting to feel freal things; we don’t feel uncomfortable identifying with her. But she also embodies, more than I think the film quite notices, the influencer’s craving for a unique, packageable identity that a guilty, hidden part of ourselves can’t help but feel would be convenient – especially if it came to us by natural right and unasked-for. 

Anya may not win against the ghost, but she does prove herself better than her rival Kenzi. She also gets to remain the heroine – and that’s because she never had to stoop to dirty marketing. 

Fate handed Anya the world’s most authentic brand. That’s a win.

In Superhost, Claire doesn’t survive: she dies at the first-kill, sexually-active-girl stage of the plot. (In a sign of the changing times, one of her sins is that Teddy makes a hopeful bid for some sex in the opening scene and she turns him down. That’s worse these days.) Teddy lives longer before he gets got, but the last person standing is murderous Rebecca, who gets to witness the annihilation of their channel. Claire managed to upload a video begging someone to call the police (as is necessary in these stories, they were in a spot with bad phone reception), but as CW might have anticipated, nobody believes it’s real. They just keep unsubscribing from the channel. 

It’s a spiteful ending from the influencer’s point of view, and too simplistic to have any Final Girl vibes. But if we keep our current lens on, we might say it’s putting them out of their misery. They’ve been liberated from life and the viewer count no longer matters; they’ve also had conclusive proof that the viewers were never coming back and weren’t worth chasing, and there’s a kind of relief in realising you can stop trying to do the impossible. 

The couple have been wretched because of the struggle to stanch the viewer loss; well, now it’s finally clear that it’s over and they can, so to speak, be at rest. 

Did they win? No . . . but at least they didn’t have to face the humiliation of quitting.  They didn’t see themselves lose.

That’s the common thread in these movies. Trying to sustain public success is exhausting. It requires decisions. It requires you to keep thinking about it. 

Wouldn’t it be kind of a relief, girls, if someone would just come in and make all those nasty decisions for you?

These are stories where we can enjoy the wish to be free of the pressure to market ourselves – even if it feels like it would take a rampage to liberate us. Sometimes the characters get to win the identity game even if they lose their lives. Anya is one example, perishing within the story but triumphing thematically, but there’s an even better example to be seen in Spree.

Just before we get to that, let’s return to Clover’s thesis – because as with the movies she talked about, these are almost entirely films by men. So if it feels like a finger is being wagged at women, what are they saying to boys?

Clover argued a horror audience can assume a genderfluid state of mind and watch stories in which different emotional states are enacted through sex-convenient characters. In her case she was mostly talking about forms of uncontrolled suffering that were officially beneath male dignity but still interesting to male viewers.

Influencer movies are a lot more decorous than this. 

I don’t just mean that they’re less gory, though they often are. I mean that they punish sins against manners more often than sins of the flesh. But we’re looking at movies made mostly by men who choose female vessels through which to explore certain longings. So what are they longing for? 

Partly it’s freedom from social media – but not entirely. If it was, we wouldn’t see so many successes on the ‘be unique and authentic’ terms that social media sets.

Let’s talk more about Spree.

Spree’s ending is pure wish-fulfilment. It just requires us to switch our allegiance from ride-share killer Kurt to stand-up comic Jessie – easy enough to do, since only one of them is a murderer. 

Kurt isn’t just violent, though; cinema is chock-full of charismatic killers. Kurt’s real sins are against the camera: he’s desperate, needy, awkward, off-putting. He says that he’ll do follow-for-follow on camera (much to Jessie’s disgust). Kurt is cringe. 

Jessie, on the other hand, is a positively classic Final Girl in that she emerges triumphant against male violence. But more subtly, she’s also what we’d all like to be if we do anything public. I remember hearing a stand-up comedian once remark that someone had heard what he did for a living and said, ‘Oh, I’d love to be famous.’ The comedian didn’t like that. He didn’t want to be famous, he said, he wanted to be successful. And when you make media, you need to be known to succeed – but you don’t want fame for its own sake.

He was probably right – though of course he said it to an audience, so I assume he polished up more messy emotions to fit the performance.

But that’s Jessie. She’s successful; she’s incidentally famous; she ends up more famous than ever – but she didn’t have to demean herself for it. Boy does she win.

It’s almost exactly the ravishment fantasy Natalie Wynn talks about in the essay I linked when talking about disavowal; the sex scenes of bodice-rippers where the man ‘takes’ the woman against her protests but she actually enjoys it. You get something you truly desire, but you also get the decorum of having everyone understand that you weren’t so improper as to admit to wanting it. 

Kurt and Jessie are the two sides of Internet performance: the cringey hunger for attention and the deserving artist. The story purges the former so that the latter can reap all the rewards. It’s pretty straightforward catharsis: if there’s anything of Kurt we see in ourselves, we can watch it get disavowed and transfer our allegiance to the more aspirational figure. 

But what Kurt hungers for, Jessie gets to feast upon. And if we assume a male audience member watching from a state of temporary gender limbo, that guy gets to enjoy it right along with her. 

In order for a woman in influencer horror to reap the validation other women are so blamed for seeking, there has to be a split. The decorum, the oh-I-don’t-care-about-it-really, must be coded female. Women who fail to possess this decorum get in trouble; to win it, they have to decline to play, and they need someone else, a Kurt or a Kenzi, to be offset against. 

But do we live in a culture where men are allowed to decline to play? Aren’t men supposed to be active and dynamic and all that thrusting stuff? 

In The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan condemned the idea of women as passive caregivers on the grounds that it was infantilising: ‘Our society forces boys, insofar as it can, to grow up, to endure the pains of growth, to educate themselves to work, to move on. Why aren’t girls forced to grow up?’ 

But you know, we live in an era of rising work hours and falling wages and rising prices and falling stability; there’s a reason people talk about ‘adulting’ as a verb now, and usually as a Sisyphean burden. 

If you’re a woman, these movies wag their finger at you: don’t be too vain, don’t be too preoccupied with success and validation, or you’ll lose touch with your real (feminine) self. 

But I wonder if for the male creators or viewers, there’s also a yearning in them to enjoy the kind of passivity horror movies can only safely force upon female characters? 

We don’t have to ‘work’ at being our authentic selves, after all. That’s who we are. It’s the struggle that’s cringe. 

But men are supposed to struggle. 

And I wonder if sometimes they’d like something, anything, to come in and fix it so they don’t have to. 

There’s the virginal element of the Final Girl in Madison, Anya and Jessie in that they get rewarded for not being greedy, sure, but I think there’s something deeper going on.

If Clover is right that Final Girls give men and boys a chance to indulge their masochistic side, perhaps influencer horror gives them a chance to indulge the dream of saying ‘Enough is enough’ and giving up. 

When we see influencer-murder movies, we get to see our cringey side punished and our deserving side rewarded. And it seems like mostly, we feel our deserving side is analog.

In Men, Women and Chain Saws, Clover makes the observation that guns are oddly absent or ineffective in slashers, despite the stories usually being set in America. 

‘In some basic sense,’ she says, ‘the emotional terrain of the slasher film is pretechnological.’

Isn’t that the emotional terrain of these influencer horrors? 

One of the tropes Clover wrote about that got ignored in favour of the Final Girl was what she called the Terrible Place. This place is enclosing, entrapping, often subterranean and full of corridors or tunnels. It’s a womb-space, a chthonic Freudian monstrous feminine. 

I think influencer films are haunted by the Internet as an invisible Terrible Place. 

We yearn to return to ‘reality’ as a cleansing rebirth; the Terrible Place is on WiFi. It’s everywhere and nowhere and we can’t see it and it rules us. It’s a devourer. It’s a succubus. It’s a darn sight less memorable visually than the Terrible Places of slasher movies, which is one reason these influencer horrors aren’t always so captivating – but it’s there, and there’s a yearning to escape from it . . . as if that could be done.

It’s rather like the world we live in, in fact: inescapable and demanding and impossible to switch off. 

Which is why Cam is so interesting.

Break out the celebrations, we’re finally going to talk about the one really excellent film on this list. And what’s so striking about it is that right from the start, it does not yearn to return to reality. It doesn’t treat the Internet as outside reality in the first place.  reality. It doesn’t treat the Internet as outside reality in the first place. 

It’s also what you get when your female lead is a fully-developed character – not a site of anxieties and disavowals, but a subject. 

In Cam, the Internet is a place a perfectly normal person can make a living and there’s nothing wrong with that. Its emotional terrain is entirely post-technological. That’s the ‘reality’ all of us actually live in – we wouldn’t have movies getting this salty about influencers if we didn’t – but it’s surprisingly hard to find a film that agrees. But with that agreement comes some genuine exploration of its terrors as well as its mundanity. 

The Internet is a Terrible Place of sorts in Cam. But not entirely. Not all of it. There’s a Terrible Place within it – but it’s vivid and potent precisely because Cam understands the Internet like a native inhabitant rather than like a terrified trespasser. 

Cam is upfront about the fact that its heroine Alice is a professional temptress. 

We’re not talking smiles and editing for clicks here. Alice (Madeleine Brewer) is a camgirl – which for those unfamiliar is an online performer who streams live sex shows. Every night she switches on her camera, greets her audience and starts with a friendly chat in which she cultivates that old parasocial goodwill as hard as she can – because that’s what brings in the tips and the tips are what earn her living. 

The cyber-tips are almost tangible: there’s a very distinctive sound effect. Those tips spend, and they bump her up the ratings. This may be virtual, but it’s also real.

Once she’s got enough tips Alice will do the striptease and get out the vibrator, though on a point of principle she won’t fake her orgasms. She doesn’t even pretend that she’s not waiting to get a certain amount of tips before she does the climax; she flirts and wheedles and coaxes her audience into tipping more so she can get on with it. Everyone knows the deal and nobody’s here under coercion. 

Alice’s business isn’t exactly high prestige, but it’s honest work. 

Of course she is technically not a social media influencer, but I don’t think it’s a meaningful distinction – and I say this not out of disrespect for influencers but out of respect for sex workers. Alice, like everyone else in these movies, produces videos for a website she doesn’t own and gets her income by cultivating a fandom. In terms of content Claire and Teddy’s Airbnb stays, Shawn’s pranks and Cecilia’s emotional wellness meditations vary from each other just as much as they do from Alice’s shows. All of their lives are dictated by the same rule: you want takings, you need engagement. We could certainly call her an influencer if she wasn’t working in an industry most people consider taboo – but it isn’t taboo to Alice, so functionally she’s working the same job.

And she wants to do it as well as she can – not for her audience, but for her own pride in her work.

Importantly, Alice won’t tell her audience she loves them, because she doesn’t. Some camgirls say they do, but that’s a hard line for her. Alice doesn’t love her viewers, and that’s okay because she doesn’t want them to love her either. She wants them to like her, but loving her would endanger her safety – because that’s how you get stalkers. There’s a clear image of what kind of customer you want: someone who tips well, encourages others people to support your stream, engages pleasantly, and understands that this makes them a good fan rather than a potential suitor. 

Cam is co-scripted by Isa Mazzei – along with director Daniel Goldhaber and co-writer Isabelle Link-Levy, so it’s the only script where women are the majority – and importantly, Mazzei herself worked as a camgirl. 

This film knows what it’s talking about. 

Alice is a small-town girl whose brother knows what she does for a living but whose mother doesn’t, and she works hard at this gig. Lola_Lola, her persona, is bubbly, playful and spontaneous-seeming, but Alice plans her performances carefully. We see her go shopping for props in the local mart, and it’s as ordinary as any shopping trip – except that we’re a little extra alert to the background, because you never know if one of the guys in here might be an over-invested fan. 

Because managing fan investment is a huge part of the job. But Cam doesn’t treat this as manipulative. Or rather, you could say that Alice manipulates her audience to some extent because she has to – but she’s trying to manipulate them into a position where they get the show she promised and respect her boundaries, which is what they should be doing anyway. 

But her viewers knows that she depends on their money, so they’re trying to manipulate her right back. There’s a fan who thinks he’s in love with her, and that’s a problem. We also see her talking to a particularly rich and sought-after customer who likes to pick favourites – and he clearly also likes to dangle his patronage to make sure he gets all the special treatment he feels entitled to. 

Alice is walking a fine line here. 

Her work isn’t just about showing her naked body; there are many thousands of girls on the site doing that. The ones who make big bucks are the ones with big audiences, and in particular with much-competed-over hyper-rich fans – guys who know full well that when you’re a wealthy client, the real power lies with you. Whatever your looks, age and personality, your money is something you can wield to make the girls fight for your attention, and you get to lie back and feel like a king.  

Alice’s job is about cultivating the exact right amount of parasocial interest: engaging enough to stand out, authentic enough that she can still feel it’s honest work, private enough that her ordinary life doesn’t get dragged down. And one of the crucial skills is handling customers so they like her just enough but not too much. 

A camgirl might want whales. She doesn’t want stalkers.

But who makes the real money?

In fact the true monster of Cam is the platform itself. 

I don’t like to spoil good films so I won’t spoil this one, but in the end it’s not Alice’s pretty body that faces the menace: it’s the right to own and manage the product that is Lola_Lola. That persona she worked so hard and so skilfully to create, and that the site takes 50% of the profits on, and that, at the end of the day, is a thing that gets sold. But who gets to be the real seller?  

This is a great film to talk about what Clover calls the ‘eye of horror’. The predatory gaze is not, for once, foisted on Alice. The real assaultive eye is the one on the site’s bottom line – unseen, but violating in ways none of these other movies ever approach. 

Something is cannibalising Alice all right, but it isn’t Alice. It’s Lola_Lola – but only when she ceases to be under Alice’s control. 

Cam has an invisible threat, but it also has a Terrible Place where you can get lost without realising it. There’s a ‘Cam Girls Clubhouse’ where performers gather to do crossover shows. Alice does a show there to push her ratings, and it’s after this that things go . . . strange. 

It’s an unnerving there, almost mythic the way the girls talk about it. There’s a ‘Vibratron’ machine you can ride for tips, but all the girls who’ve gone on it warn against it: ‘That shit destroys your clit,’ her friend advises her. It’s a place of mechanised violence under the guise of pleasure, the men paying for it only visible as usernames on a screen. Public yet enclosed, a place where the light is eerie and synthetic to the point that night and day lose all meaning. 

This is a real-world Terrible Place that opens the door to the invisible one. But the invisible one produces videos, and we get to see those too, and there’s a powerful visual uncanniness going on. Cam’s neon and shadows are deeply atmospheric, and they create what other influencer horror doesn’t: a strong sense of the tangible deeply rooted in the virtual. 

Is it a chthonic womb, as Clover would argue? Well, yes and no. I don’t think I can answer that without being very blunt, so here we go: if you’re scared of a pussy, cis camgirls are not for you. 

But if you are a cis camgirl, it’s scary if the person who controls your pussy isn’t you.

That’s the fear with potentially predatory fans, and it’s the fear of the monstrosity that later manifests. 

Alice’s body is a friend to her: a source of income she can own and treat as she sees fit. If the Cam Girls Clubhouse is a Terrible Place, it doesn’t look so different from the filming room in Alice’s own house. 

Alice’s filming room is a bit of a neon dreamscape too – but while it’s liminal, it’s also completely safe. She’s the only person there. She doesn’t have sex in there with anyone except herself. If dark, dank spaces are vaginal as Clover would suggest, this is the figurative as well as the literal safety of masturbation: it’s her pussy and her liminal space and she gets to say what happens in either. 

But that’s not what a pushy fan wants – and pushy fans’ money is good for the company. If they’ll pay for more than Alice wants to give, isn’t it that a financial problem for the platform if she keeps saying no? Wouldn’t it be convenient if Alice was less of a producer and more of a product? 

At the end of the day Alice’s problem isn’t sexual at all. Her problem is that she’s an exploited worker in a gig economy.

But her solution can’t be to free herself from the Internet and return to the safety of ‘reality’. That’s what the police suggest when she goes to them for help, and they say this because they don’t care about the likes of her. 

Alice can’t quit. What would she do for money? She’s a blue-collar girl in a small town. Her mother is a beautician and that’s fine, but Alice would like to make more money and she’s worked very hard to get there, and why should she have to give it up when she did it honestly? 

Cam is influencer horror all right, but it does what none of the others do. It treats Internet performance as work – and it respects work. 

Some of the cam-workers have bigger egos than others, but that’s not the point. The point is that it’s labour you have every right to expect a reward for, and putting a lot of time and energy into that isn’t being vain and shallow. It’s being diligent, industrious, dedicated, productive. 

And in cinematic language, it’s something else too. Alice isn’t an image of Vanity taking selfies. 

Alice is a filmmaker.

Sure, it’s low art – but so is horror. And Alice seems to have a healthy appreciation of both.

The first scene we see Alice do, she switches up from a ‘cumshow’ to pretending she’s cutting her throat onscreen in response to fan harassment (actually a confederate in the chat). She does a little horror skit, because why not? She has a regular following and she likes to keep them entertained, and also she clearly likes to keep herself entertained because she’s a lively-minded person. 

Alice is known for doing ‘crazy’ stunts; that’s part of how she keeps engagement up. But she’s also doing what creative people do when the job isn’t quite what you’d choose: she keeps the quality high for her own satisfaction. She might make porn, but she makes good porn. 

Honestly, this is an extremely realistic portrait that goes far beyond camwork. Let me give you an example. I write novels, but fiction doesn’t pay very much, so I also copy/ghostwrite this and that to make money. Back when I was just starting out I didn’t think to use a pen name, so if you look for my fiction on Amazon you’ll also find this little gift book:

It’s a collection of stock photos of dogs, for which I had to find inspiring poetry quotations. Was it a deep expression of my soul? Guys, I am a cat person. But it was the work I had in front of me, so I did my absolute best to find nice quotations that matched the pictures, and the end result was something I felt pretty good about. It didn’t express much about me personally, and it’s certainly off-brand for the fiction that does – but that’s what you do when you have a bread-job: you make it a good bread-job. You take your creative satisfaction where you can get it.

That’s Alice. She’s being creative as best she can.

The ‘crazy’ persona she created allows her to have some fun, but offscreen Alice is far from crazy. She’s organised. She keeps track of her nightly gimmicks on a wall calendar to make sure she isn’t repeating herself. She keeps new props in play. She studies the videos of the site’s top earner with laser focus, trying to figure out the secret of her success. 

Why does Alice want to succeed so badly? It’s not because she’s vain. It’s certainly not because she’s addicted to being adored: the last thing she needs is for her fans to become over-devoted.

Money is a perfectly good reason in this film, but there are others. After all, she’s already well into the top 100; she’s making a living. 

Part of it is about relationships. Alice isn’t emotionally disconnected; she loves her family and hates hiding her life from her mother. She wants to break the top 50 before she ’fesses up, because, ‘Hey Mom, I’m a star camgirl,’ is easier to say than just, ‘Hey Mom, I’m a camgirl.’ 

But you get the sense that deep down, the real reason is that she put a lot of thought and effort into these videos, and she wants to see them succeed the way any artist wants their work to succeed. She made them; why wouldn’t she want them to do well?

It’s work – but it can be creative work. That’s worth fighting for.

Because Cam was made by someone who knows what it’s like to be a camgirl, it understands how to look past the shallow archetype. In most horror movies influencers are essentially the same person they are on camera, except more devious: not really about anything but their brand. Cam knows that’s not true.

And the reason why is that it understands Internet performance is a job.

In a lot of these influencer horrors there really seems to be a hostility to the idea of female work. 

Partly it’s just the old sexist saw that a pretty woman can ‘get by on her looks’, often on the money she charms out of poor helpless men. The temptress.

As well as that old chestnut, there’s also a strong sense in these movies that a successful influencer is stealing a living. Except for Cam, which shows that the streaming is the shortest part of a long work day, these films make it look as if all you have to do is bat your eyes into camera, maybe go over your lines a few times, and then click ‘upload.’

And in the wish-fulfilment side of things, of course it’d be lovely if that was true, especially if fate showered you with well-deserved but unasked rewards for it. But in fact full-time influencers are busy; in the Ellis video I linked above, she and a male influencer (Hank Green) agree that in fact it’s hard to ever feel themselves off the clock. 

But in these movies there’s little sense of the actual labour that goes into influencer work. 

Filming yourself? Sure. But scripting, location scouting, costumes, props, make-up, lighting, sound, editing, sponsor-wrangling, scheduling, book-keeping? Heck, even marketing beyond fretting over what might get clicks? We see very little of in any of these. They just look pretty and crave attention.

But at the same time, that feeling of ‘I don’t know what relaxing is,’ as Green put it, is attributed to the female characters. It’s just that we only see them dwelling on the social/egotistical side of it: how they come across to the world and whether enough people are watching them. They only fail to relax because they’re thinking about themselves all the time.

From Influencer to Superhost to Mind Body Spirit, the great sin of influencing is that it distracts women from working on their relationships – usually romantic, but familial and friendship as well. We aren’t shown them doing the technical or admin grunt work that might draw our sympathy; all we see is the distraction divorced of justification.

These women are paying attention to something they control instead of living for others. And that’s a sign that they’re defective. 

Whatever the male audience identifies with, in its message to female viewers it’s positively Victorian.

The trouble is, what they’re doing is just plain work. Do you spend every second of your day looking after your relationships instead of doing the thing that earns you money? If so, congratulations on your independent wealth, please give me some. For the rest of us, work is something you have to think about.

I’m supposed to be fixing lunch right now because it’s Sunday, but I’m trying to get ahead of my writing week and had something I wanted to note down so I went to my desk instead. It’s winter and my feet are bare because I kept thinking of notes to take and haven’t got round to putting on my shoes yet. My husband and son are even in the house, yet here I am instead of talking to them. When you work on something, and especially on something that you make, it’s part of the life that that sometimes something requires your attention and you have to seize the moment of opportunity or inspiration before it passes. At least if you want it to be good. 

Makers of things get distracted by what they make. That’s just how it is. When you work on something interesting, it can capture your interest.

But in most movies, that’s the act of a bad woman. It’s a very new technology telling a very old story: women who care for anything of their own are going to get it. I feel like if I don’t assure you that my husband and son are fine, somebody’s going to come kidnap me. 

Goodness. I didn’t expect to be quite so pissed off with influencer horror by the end of this review, but there you go; just writing it kept making me feel like I should be stabbed by someone calling me a fake. And if acting normally makes you feel like you’re occupying the role of deserving victim, there’s something screwy going on. 

Influencer horror likes to pretend that influencer work is easy. It took a film down-to-earth enough to be about literal sex work to be honest about the fact that work is work, including self-marketing. Good thing it’s such a great movie. 

So fuck it. Don’t forget to like, share and subscribe, guys! 

Buy my fiction! It’s a great price on Kindle right now! (https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CCF16MJH?binding=kindle_edition&qid=1733239341&sr=8-1&ref=dbs_dp_rwt_sb_pc_tkin) 

Vote for this column to win the BSFA award! Number One here we come! (https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSegON8cQ_2NTo1rkVaT7h_KYbrvS4W3s__FFUB-YwVT0vrtqA/viewform)  

I’m serious, do both those things!

We live in the attention economy. We all want to be a Jessie rather than a Kurt; we all want to be seen as an Anya rather than a Claire. We’d all like it if we could just be ourselves and prosper without having to do that undignified scrambling.

But the truth is that we’re all Alice. This is work, and it’s honest work. 

Just put down the axe and we’ll be fine. 

Kit Whitfield’s “What’s On Shudder” articles are a must-read for any horror enthusiast looking to enhance their streaming experience. These articles offer a comprehensive guide to the latest and most exciting horror films available on Shudder TV, diving deep into the genre’s rich tapestry. One of the standout features of Whitfield’s work is her unwavering passion for horror, which resonates throughout her writing. She not only highlights key films but also provides insightful commentary on themes, directors, and the evolution of horror as a genre.

Additionally, her articles often include hidden gems and lesser-known films that might be overlooked in the crowded streaming landscape. This can lead to discovering unique stories and innovative filmmaking that challenge conventional horror tropes. Whitfield’s expertise ensures that readers gain a better understanding of the films’ cultural significance and artistic merits.

For both die-hard horror fans and newcomers alike, checking out “What’s On Shudder” is an invaluable resource for finding thought-provoking content that goes beyond mere scares. Her engaging style and knowledgeable perspectives make the horror genre accessible to everyone. Whether you’re in search of a terrifying thrill or a deeper exploration of cinematic horror, Whitfield’s articles are the perfect companion for your Shudder journey.