Festivals - PIFFF2025 : Influencers, A Smart, Unsettling Horror Reflection on Influencer Culture

By Mulder, Parix, Max Linder Panorama, 11 december 2025

As part of the PIFFF 2025 festival, the Paris International Fantastic Film Festival once again proved its knack for spotting sharp, contemporary genre cinema by hosting a preview screening of Influencers, the new horror thriller written and directed by Kurtis David Harder, and the evening quickly took on the feel of a special event rather than a routine festival slot. The screening was attended by Kurtis David Harder himself, alongside actresses Cassandra Naud and Lisa Delamar, who took the time to introduce the film to the audience with a mix of enthusiasm and playful secrecy, clearly aware that half the pleasure lay in letting the story unfold without spoilers. After the credits rolled, the trio returned for an extended and genuinely fascinating Q&A, during which the crowd’s reactions — laughter, nervous murmurs, and stunned silence at key moments — were openly acknowledged and dissected, giving the impression that Influencers is very much designed as a dialogue with its audience, a mirror held up to our increasingly curated and performative online lives.

Influencers is a 2025 horror thriller that serves as a sequel to Influencer (2022), and Kurtis David Harder was keen to explain how returning to this universe felt less like repeating himself and more like expanding a thematic playground he feels is far from exhausted. Cassandra Naud reprises her role, anchoring the film with a presence that feels both familiar and newly dangerous, while the ensemble cast — Georgina Campbell, Lisa Delamar, Jonathan Whitesell, Veronica Long, and Dylan Playfair — allows the story to splinter into multiple perspectives on obsession, visibility, and control. Set in the sun-drenched landscapes of southern France, the film follows CW and her French girlfriend Diane as they celebrate their first anniversary, only to have their romantic getaway disrupted when they are bumped from their hotel room in favor of Charlotte, a popular British influencer whose relentless friendliness masks something far more invasive. As Charlotte ingratiates herself into Diane’s life, refusing to leave the couple alone, CW’s irritation curdles into something darker, and the film slowly but deliberately tightens the screws around themes of jealousy, identity theft, and the violence that can lurk beneath perfectly filtered smiles.

What makes Influencers particularly striking, and what came up repeatedly during the Q&A, is how consciously Kurtis David Harder uses beauty as a weapon. The picturesque settings of southern France — echoed by filming locations in Bali and Canada during the 2024 shoot — are not merely backdrops but active participants in the deception, their postcard perfection contrasting sharply with the moral rot unfolding onscreen. Deadline aptly described the film as deepening a cinematic universe built around deception and online identity, and that expansion is felt here in both scale and ambition, with Influencers offering a broader canvas than its predecessor while retaining an intimate, almost claustrophobic psychological edge. Cassandra Naud spoke candidly about how unsettling it was to revisit her character with the knowledge of how audiences had responded to the first film, while Lisa Delamar shared anecdotes about navigating a role that intentionally blurs the line between charm and threat, a balance that plays out chillingly in the finished film.

From a production standpoint, Influencers is a Canada–United States co-production, produced by Jack Campbell, Chris Ball, Taylor Nodrick, Rebecca Campbell, Kurtis David Harder, and Micah Henry under the Jackrabbit Media banner, which also holds worldwide rights and presented the film to international buyers at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. The technical craft is equally worth noting, with David Schuurman’s cinematography leaning into natural light and luxurious compositions that gradually give way to colder, more invasive framing, while the editing by Rob Grant and Kurtis David Harder himself keeps the narrative taut across its 110-minute running time. The score by Avery Kentis subtly underscores the growing unease, often slipping in under the skin rather than announcing itself, a choice that feels particularly effective in a film so concerned with what remains hidden behind polished surfaces.

The festival journey of Influencers has already been impressive, beginning with its world premiere at the 29th Fantasia International Film Festival on July 26, 2025, where it screened in the Septentrion Shadows section, before closing FrightFest for its UK premiere in August 2025 and appearing in the Borsos Competition at the 2025 Whistler Film Festival. A clip released by Letterboxd on July 21, 2025, featuring Cassandra Naud and Georgina Campbell, further fueled online curiosity, a fitting bit of meta-promotion for a film dissecting influencer culture. The film is also slated to close the Blood in the Snow Film Festival in Toronto on November 22, 2025, ahead of its December 12, 2025 release on Shudder, which holds distribution rights for English-speaking territories — a platform that feels particularly well-suited to a film that thrives on immediacy and conversation.

Seen in the context of PIFFF 2025, Influencers feels less like a simple sequel and more like a sharp escalation, a horror thriller that understands the quiet terror of being watched, copied, and erased in the digital age. The presence of Kurtis David Harder, Cassandra Naud, and Lisa Delamar at the screening only reinforced that this is a film very much aware of its moment, unafraid to provoke discomfort while inviting audiences to reflect on their own relationship with online personas. For those curious to relive the evening, photos and video coverage by Boris Colletier for Mulderville are available, capturing a night where horror, satire, and unsettling self-recognition collided in the best possible way.

You can discover our photos in our Flickr page

Synopsis:
A young woman's morbid fascination with murder and identity theft plunges her into a whirlwind of chaos.

Influencers
Written and directed by Kurtis David Harder
Produced by Jack Campbell, Chris Ball, Taylor Nodrick, Rebecca Campbell, Kurtis David Harder, Micah Henry
Starring Cassandra Naud, Georgina Campbell, Jonathan Whitesell, Lisa Delamar, Veronica Long, Dylan Playfair
Director of photography: David Schuurman
Editing: Rob Grant, Kurtis David Harder
Music: Avery Kentis
Production company: Jackrabbit Media
Distribution: Shudder
Release dates: July 26, 2025 (Fantasia), December 12, 2025 (United States)
Running time: 110 minutes

Photos and Video : Boris Colletier / Mulderville