‘Influencer’ Director Kurtis David Harder On Making A New Kind of Influencer Horror
Mary Beth McAndrews
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Kurtis David Harder knows how to build suspense, as he showed the horror world with his 2019 film Spiral. Now, Harder is back with a new twisty thriller that brings Hitchcock to our contemporary moment. Influencer, directed by Harder and co-written by Harder and Tesh Guttikonda, is a look at the world of content creators like you’ve never seen before, ditching vapid live streamers for frustrated characters who feel stuck in their digital careers.
Read the full synopsis:
While struggling on a solo backpacking trip in Thailand, social media influencer Madison meets CW, who travels with ease and shows her a more uninhibited way of living, but CW’s interest in her takes a darker turn.
Dread Central spoke with Harder about influencing as a career, Single White Female, the terror of Signs, and more.
Dread Central: It’s so exciting to chat with you today about Influencer, which rocked my world. I wanted to hear why influencers and what about them interested you to the point of making a horror movie?
Kurtis David Harder: I think it’s interesting that it’s become such a highly sought-after career choice, especially for young people. So I think like for us, for [co-writer] Tesh and I, when we were writing it, it was very much exploring how people get trapped in these kinds of career choices. What is it about it that is so intriguing? Like you’re not really contributing that much typically when you’re just kind of marketing yourself. So what about it can be actually satisfying. And I think that that kind of stemmed that. And then the idea that we kind of look for things that we feel safe with. So when you go across all the way across the world, you’re seeing a lot of people just go eat fast food. So I think it stemmed from a couple of different conversations Tesha and I were having.
DC: I do like how you made this about a career and them as people. So many movies about influencers want to make them dumb characters. But I think with your characters, you tend to get more about the person behind the pictures and have a little bit more of a conversation around that, as well as influencers as people who are just trying to do a job that maybe they don’t like.
KDH: Yeah. I think for us it was very much kind of like using that as a bit of an easy scapegoat and playing with people’s preconceived notions. There are a lot of movies that mock them or think of them as not people. Whereas we were trying to explore the platform of influencing as opposed to the individuals and not judging individuals, but more exploring the why and who are these people offline versus the persona that they put online that is very easy to just judge.
DC: I love how you talk about technology. I don’t wanna give spoilers, but there’s some stuff that already scares me about reality and deep fakes, so watching Influencer terrified me even more.
KDH: Yeah. When we made the movie, we started writing this in like 2018, 2019, and the technology was super primitive. And so it’s been weird. Everything in the movie we did for real. There’s no fakery. But back then when we were making the movie, the technology we were using was super janky. Now it’s weird how even though it’s only been a couple years since we shot the film, just how much the technology has evolved. It feels like this story could be even more real sooner. Like it wasn’t really possible back then. We were obviously making a film, but now it feels like we’re, we’re not too far off from this being a possibility. It’s pretty scary. <laugh>
DC: So did you film all on location in Thailand?
Speaker 2 (04:02):
KDH: Yeah. There are a couple of sequences that we shot in Canada for some of the flashback sequences, but the rest was in Thailand. We were there for almost three months.
DC: So what was that experience like, filming in Thailand and finding these beautiful locations?
KDH: It was crazy. I had gone over there in 2019 and Tesh had come when we were just starting off the script. We both made the trip that the characters do and just went to all the places to see what would be possible and if there was like a new place that would inspire something for us in the story. Then shooting there was a bit of a double-edged sword. We were originally supposed to shoot in early 2020 and the pandemic pushed us back about a year and a half from when we were soft green-lit to go shoot it. So it was a bit of a weird experience because of how empty the country was.
Basically, the country had just opened up. We were waiting and we knew when the border was gonna allow tourism and filming to kind of come back up. So we went pretty much as soon as we were able to, because we had everybody lined up and ready to go. It kind of added a new, interesting flair to the film where the original script before the pandemic was very much about how crazy the tourism over there is. Tourism is such a big part of their, their industry there.
So it was an interesting thing where the story already had this aspect of isolation in paradise so to speak, where you think that you’re having such a great time, but you’re actually very isolated. The fact that the country was so empty gave us access to some of the beaches that would normally be packed. So good and bad, too, with the pandemic. <laugh>
DC: Why Thailand specifically?
KDH: Before I’d been there, it was a place that had a mystical feeling for me anyways, I find Southeast Asia has Thailand in general, just the landscapes and the culture. And when the pandemic hit we were looking at other options and we’d started to debate, “Well Mexico’s opening up or Costa Rica’s opening up, would this story work there?” And we basically decided if it’s not Thailand, I don’t think it’s worth doing it. There’s something about that that was so attached for Tesh and me to the story.
DC: We have to talk about Cassandra Naud because she’s an icon in this movie. I want to hear more about casting Cassandra and shaping CW’s character.
KDH: This was Cassandra’s first feature in a lead role. So it was really cool to work with her on this. How we were auditioning that role is we were doing full read-throughs of the script on Zoom as we were writing it. So we’d be able to see the full spectrum of the character. So it was an interesting casting process where she came in and did the read-through on Zoom where she actually originally played the other two girls. It was a cool way to see the chameleon aspect of the character.
Then inherently as soon as she started reading it, it was like, “Oh we found our CW.” Developing the character was really fun with her because it was a bit of a vessel. We were waiting to figure out who was gonna play CW. And so when she came on board there were a lot of conversations where we talked through it and I said, “Come up with a backstory. I don’t want to know. This is for you to have.” So she actually wrote down a bunch of stuff and has it in her head. I actually still don’t know exactly what she decided on, which was really fun. It was a fun exercise that we just decided to be like, “You have your secrets. I don’t need them.”
DC: That’s amazing. And she’s like a femme fatale, an erotic thriller-type character. Even though this isn’t really an erotic thriller. Single White Female vibes.
KDH: It’s really funny that that movie comes up because Tesh and I had never seen it. I only just recently watched it and it was really funny to see all the little parallels, like the little things that happened in both films. There are definitely parallels.
Oh, and Cassandra, she’d never driven a bike motorbike before. She’d never driven a boat, international travel was a new thing for her. So it was a lot of firsts for her it was, it was really cool. She just totally stepped up to the plate and learned all these new abilities. <laugh>
DC: So what’s next for you?
KDH: We got a couple of things in development. There’s another film that I’m hoping to direct later this year. And then Brandon [Christensen]’s got another one that we’re developing. And then we’re just jumping into post-production on this new one. So nothing huge to report yet, buts things are in the works.
DC: Cool. So this is something I like to ask every filmmaker, what is the scariest movie you’ve ever seen?
KDH: The scariest movie I’ve ever seen? Oh man, that’s a hard one. When I was a kid, I watched Signs, which scared me a lot. As a kid, I couldn’t sleep for like a month.
DC: Signs ruined me as a child. My dad pretended it was real, too.
KDH: Yeah, I think that one definitely stood out. It is the one that probably had the biggest impact I think in terms of just traumatizing [me]. But I think when you grow older, it’s hard for me to really, truly get terrified. But I know there’s been a couple that have irked me. Like Antichrist definitely threw me off a bit.
DC: I watched didn’t really understand it. Like, I dunno going on. I’m not a huge fan, but you’re operating on another Level with him.
KDH: He’s on a different level of darkness.
DC: He really is.
KDH: Yeah. It’s like stay over there, Lars, you weirdo. <laugh>
Categorized:Interviews
