Writer and director Kurtis David Harder on ‘Influencers’: “Part of the fun is that you don’t have all the answers”
Everyone knows that social media can be a perilous place at the best of times, with writer and director Kurtis David Harder taking the dangers of online existence to terrifying new levels with his 2023 horror thriller, Influencer, and now its equally effective sequel, Influencers.
In the opening chapter, Emily Tennant’s Madison makes the mistake of welcoming Cassandra Naud’s mysterious CW into her life, only for the interloper to reveal that even in real life, it’s risky to take anyone or anything at face value, with her so-called friend manipulating her, stealing her identity, destroying her relationship, and marooning her on a deserted island, all while leaving several dead bodies in her wake.
Of course, anyone who’s seen Influencer will know that CW gets her comeuppance, but not for long. In Influencers, which is now streaming on Shudder, the enigmatic figure seems to have found some sense of normality, living a peaceful and picturesque life in France with her girlfriend, Lisa Delamar’s Diane.
However, things go off the rails during their one-year anniversary celebrations, when an intrusive social media influencer, Georgina Campbell’s Charlotte, rubs CW the wrong way. Suddenly, she finds herself returning to her old ways, this time destroying her own idyllic reality after failing to control her impulses.
What follows is a game of cat and mouse that threatens CW from all angles. She’s headed off to Bali, where she worms her way into the lives of two more influencers: Veronica Long’s right-wing grifter Ariana and Jonathan Whitesell’s manosphere man-child Jacob, neither of whom is what they seem. Trying to stay one step ahead of everyone and everything as the walls close in around her, things threaten to go completely off the rails.
While it’s fair to assume that because Influencer concluded on an open-ended note and was widely acclaimed for its originality and inventiveness, a sequel was always on the cards, Harder had no designs on creating a franchise when he wrapped the first film, and he managed to keep Influencers fairly under the radar until it was was announced in May 2025 that the movie had wrapped principal photography.
“It’s been a wild journey,” he admitted. “We didn’t quite expect to be doing a sequel when we were making the first one, and it all kind of came together very quickly. We went and shot it without announcing anything, and so it’s been a wild kind of ride to shoot the film and, boom, and then premiere it, and do the festival run, so it’s been quite the lead-up.”
The problem with many sequels these days is that they’re only made because the first one was popular. Instead of an idea justifying a second instalment, a second instalment gets the green light before it’s got an idea to justify its existence. That wasn’t the case with Influencers, though, with Harder explaining that it was his attachment to the character of CW more than anything that inspired him.
“I think even less than justifying, what was really fun for me was finding this whole different side of CW that we’re seeing,” he observed. “Her relationship with France, and you’re not totally sure out of the gate where this fits in the grand scheme of the timeline of the first film. And so that was really an interesting set-off point for me as a storyteller.”
Beyond that, Harder knew that “there’s so much more to mine with not only the way that the internet and technology and AI have advanced,” which provided plenty of narrative opportunities, but “also with the characters and seeing new sides of them and exploring some bigger depths of where they’ve ended up, so to speak.” If anything, he’s selling his latest feature a little short.
At various points, the film trades in blood, barbarism, despair, murder, knock-down and drag-out brawls, identity theft, deepfakes, the notion of influencers being the ones who are influenced, growing too attached to an AI companion, trying to prove your innocence in a sea of online knee-jerk reactions, and more. It sounds like a lot to take on in two hours or less, but Harder weaves the threads together.
Of course, one of the biggest burning questions that viewers of both pictures will have is how exactly CW escaped from her predicament as the credits rolled on Influencer, a question the director wasn’t willing to answer with any specificity. “We have our answer for sure,” he teased. “But I think what’s really fun, when you see the film, we definitely have a little bit of fun with that.”
As sequels are wont to do, Influencers is much bigger in scope and scale than its predecessor, but it’s still a relatively small-scale film, comparatively speaking. The first was shot entirely in Thailand, but the second ups the stakes and flits from France to Bali, with most of the footage captured on location. It wasn’t Harder’s first rodeo, but he was thankful to have an experienced crew along for the ride.
“What worked about coming into this one is that most of the cast and crew are good,” he offered. “I mean, we had some new faces and stuff, but a lot of them had gone through the wringer with what we learned on the first film, with such a small group. Part of that ethos of having a small group travelling to different locations allows you to get in and out of locations effectively, as opposed to a big crew coming in and having to move the circus, so to speak.”
The obvious challenge was that Influencers was a bigger production: “We did three countries on this round, and I was on the road for almost five months,” he added. “I think it was definitely a marathon. In terms of that, it was definitely a challenge.” Not that he and his crew weren’t up to the task, with Harder and his crew relishing the jaunt that took them around the world.
Influencers opens with a bang, too, as the opening scene features a shocking act of brutality that’s delivered entirely without context. Knowing that audiences, particularly those with a fondness for the horror/thriller space, are harder than ever to surprise, Harder wanted to let audiences know that they should expect the unexpected from the first frame to the last.
“I mean, audiences have seen every movie,” he acknowledged. “We’ve been through the wringer of surprises and understanding how setups work. To actually surprise modern audiences is a really fun challenge to undertake. And both these films are very much about playing with structure, playing with expectations, playing with first impressions of characters.”
“To have this fun little taste of, ‘OK, the story is going to end up here at some point, where is this all culminating?’ And I think all of the characters’ reactions to what happens is a fun thing to explore.”
Kurtis David Harder
Even though it’s only been a touch over three years since Influencer premiered, the subculture depicted in the film has already changed irrevocably, largely with the rise and alarmingly increasing ubiquity of AI. It felt like a terrifyingly serendipitous time for Harder to return to the world he’d previously established, and he agreed that these developments organically lent themselves to CW’s return.
“When we did the first film, ChatGPT wasn’t a thing yet,” he noted. “That was not out. And I think you could kind of see this coming, and nobody really knew exactly what it was, and we still don’t know where the technology is going to take us, culturally or as a society. I think with the first film, it was the look into, ‘Oh, these technologies are primitive, but give it a year.'”
“I think the idea of stealing someone’s identity, or using these technologies maliciously online, was a thing that felt like, ‘OK, we should probably try to figure this out,'” Harder elaborated. “I think with technology, human beings tend to just rush in and face the consequences later. And as we’ve seen with kind of social media and the rise of anxiety in our youth and even adults, I think coming into this one, it was like, ‘Well, now this is really ubiquitous, the use of AI as a technology, the world has completely shifted.'”
He knows that “it’s wild” to think that by the time Influencer was released, the technology that his film had depicted as being somewhat fantastical was “starting to become real.” Heading into the follow-up, he was of the same mindset: “OK, what’s around the next corner?” the director wondered. “What are some of the ways that this technology could be used in an interesting way, and I think I explored some different sides of those uses with this one.”
As well as playing the lead character, Naud is also listed as a co-producer on Influencers. As you might expect, that meant she was in on the ground floor when Harder first hatched the idea. When it “clicked,” he hammered out “the first 30 pages in a couple of days,” and sent it out to gauge the reaction.
“Do we want to jump into this world again?” he wondered. Obviously, the answer was yes. “It was really fun to have some of the cast and a lot of the same crew and producers. We’d kind of been through this journey before, and coming in and knowing that we were putting it all together. With Cassandra, it was cool to talk to her about the character, and because we’d built this up together in that way, we already had a foundation to work off of.”
Around the time of Influencer‘s release, despite being the creator of the character, Harder said that even he didn’t know the full details of CW’s backstory. He entrusted Naud to develop her external life and keep the broader strokes to herself, and not too much has changed, even after making a second movie together.
“There’s always some fun to be had, where we’ve continued the conversation,” he hinted. “There’s obviously a lot that we continue to flesh out, and especially coming into this one, where we’re seeing the relationship side of her, and we’re seeing more different characters of hers. I think the conversations continue to grow and evolve our understanding of this character. It’s been really cool to dig a little deeper together.”
When a character becomes popular while still retaining an air of mystery, sequels have an irritating habit of over-explaining their motivations and why they are the way they are. Fortunately, Harder was fully aware of that and remained cognisant of not falling into the over-explained origin story trap when creating CW’s arc in Influencers.
“When Tesh [Guttikonda, Influencer co-writer] and I wrote the first one, we wanted to find that balance of not falling into ‘the villain speech’ of over-explaining and losing a bit of that mystery. CW is a bit of an enigma. We don’t know exactly how she’s learned these things, but we get these little tastes. And I think with this film, it’s fun to play into that and evolve the balance of how much we want to explore with her, while still keeping her a mystery.”
According to the guy who wrote, directed, and produced the two films, “Part of the fun is that you don’t have all the answers of how she’s gotten to the place that she is,” and it’s impossible to disagree. Not every elusive character with a penchant for murder and manipulation needs to detail their motivations, and CW is much better served by retaining an aura of mystery.
As mentioned, two of the characters she falls in with represent opposing ends of the influencer spectrum. Ariana caters to the political set, while Jacob tailors his content to impressionable men. When the story progresses, it’s revealed that neither of them necessarily practices what they preach online, a duality that Harder was keen to explore in a way that dovetailed with CW’s story.
“That was a big thing,” he concurred. “The concept of audience capture was a big thing that John and I talked extensively about; the idea that what you put out online does end up having a feedback loop of reactions, and what your audience wants, especially when you have a larger audience, you’re going to get these reactions and feedback. So I think with a character like Jacob, it’s coming in really hot and seeing kind of the message that he’s putting out in a very loud way.”
Then, he decided to flip it. “Is he the one perpetuating this voice, or is this his relationship with his partner? Is this his audience?” he wants his film to ask its audience. “I think the concept and the title of the idea of ‘influencer’ is not just solely the social media kind, I think it does dive into the influences that come in a variety of passions.”
Along similar lines, Maddie doesn’t return until around the midway point. Again, that was a deliberate move on Harder’s part, especially when conventional sequel wisdom would have probably hinged the entire film on a straightforward revenge story that would see her hunting down CW to exact retribution for the events of the first movie.
“That goes back to kind of the whole idea of CW’s relationship in France,” he detailed. “It plays into it; it doesn’t really give you anything to know in terms of the timeline, where this fits in the story. So I think that was really fun playing, like, ‘Is this potentially a prequel? Is this potentially CW’s first kill?’ That was very fun to explore.”
She might make a late entrance, but Maddie’s return doesn’t only make sense within the context of her character and what viewers already know she’s been through, but it also ties into the wider themes of Influencers: she’s shown making a podcast appearance where she’s effectively set up and gaslit, reiterating that social media has no issues letting the truth get in the way of a good story.
“I think the internet is ruthless,” came the understated insight. “I think, especially if you were to see a situation like this, and I’ve seen real-life situations where something gets posted of someone who’s a victim, and then they end up being harassed to the point where they they’re it’s almost like they’re the perpetrator of this problem. And I think that was really fun to showcase the idea of doxing and these different things that the internet can be absolutely ruthless about.”
As you can imagine, making a movie where the central character is essentially a serial killer that operates as a psychological thriller with a hint of a slasher flick, delves into the influence of online culture, serves as a revenge story and occasionally a very dark comedy, often in the space of the same scene, requires a delicate tonal balancing act, one that Harder was always confident he could pull off.
It can get very dark, but there is a lot of levity and comedy that we’ve tried to play into. When you have a lead character doing these despicable things, it does have to be fun.
Kurtis David Harder
“And I think playing into the idea that this is, at the end of the day, really just a fun ride, and then beneath it,” Harder added. “We’re exploring all these different things, is definitely why I’m drawn to these stories”.
If there’s one scene in Influencers that encapsulates that approach, it’s a fight scene between CW and Madison. It’s brutal, but in a weirdly comedic, almost slapstick way, it’s also pretty funny. “Yeah, we had a lot of fun with that,” the filmmaker beamed. It was originally planned for the end of the first movie, but logistics meant it couldn’t happen, and it was an opportunity he wouldn’t miss out on again.
“It was something I always wanted to do, and being able to come back and do a proper fight sequence… We had a fight choreographer and doubles working with the girls, with stunt training, and having the time to actually prepare, and then having… We shot this sequence over five days in Bali… It was so satisfying for all of us,” he proclaimed. “I think it was an itch that we really wanted to scratch.”
Dancing around spoilers in the interest of anyone who hasn’t seen it, but Influencers follows in its predecessor’s footsteps by ending on another somewhat open-ended note, one that puts CW in a completely different starting position should a third movie ever happen, not that Harder is willing to commit.
“We’ll see,” came the vague reply. “We’ll see how the audience is with this one. There’s no set plans right now.” What does seem fairly set in stone are the filmmaker’s genre preferences; Influencers, Influencer, Spiral, and Incontrol all see Harder blending horror and thriller with relevant social commentary and timely themes, all while upending and subverting expectations, and it’s a sandbox he’s willing to stay in for at least a while yet.
“Genre is such a fun box to play in, because it has so much potential to dive into the darkness of different sides of society,” he said. “For me, I think it’s a great avenue to explore the stuff that I’m really interested in, with contemporary issues, and being able to dig a little deeper.” That said, he’s keeping his options open.
“I love the thriller space, I think horror is wonderful, but I wouldn’t jump at a drama or anything,” Harder clarified, unless it spoke to him on a personal level. “It depends on the story more than the genre that it necessarily fits into. For me, it’s about character, and what the film is trying to explore.”
He’ll be on familiar ground with FOMO, which he was announced to be directing in October 2025. Tantalisingly described as ‘Midsommar meets Squid Game‘, the story will follow a group of friends who travel to Greece and soon realise they’ve become caught up in an ancient ritual: survive their trials, and they’ll be rewarded, but fail and they’ll be offered up as a sacrifice.
Understandably, Harder remains sworn to some degree of secrecy: “I think it’s an extension and an expansion of what we’ve been building with the Influencer films. It’s obviously a very different film, but in terms of travel and a very fun ride, it definitely takes things up a notch.”
It fits the bill for the movies he’s already made and wants to continue making, and it sounds like a logical next step.
