A Horror Movie Targeting the Ugliness of Influencer Culture
In what will come as a shock to no one, a good deal of what you see online isn’t real. That’s especially true when it comes to social media influencers, who create idealized—and desirable—personas on Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, and then use their clout to hawk products for their own personal benefit. They’re the 21st century equivalent of paid infomercial actors and hosts, and their blather is about as trustworthy as anything else you hear from a corporation that’s trying to sell you the latest, greatest whatever that’ll help you win friends and influence people—not to mention increase your follower count.
Writer/director Jennifer Harrington wades into these digital waters with Shook, a thriller that’s heavy on censure and woefully light on scares. A Shudder exclusive premiering on the horror streaming platform on Feb. 18, its tale concerns Mia (Daisye Tutor), a young, pretty blonde influencer whose claim to fame are makeup videos for a cosmetics brand. The phoniness of Mia’s vocation is underscored by the film’s introductory scene, in which she and two other women—including “beauty influencer of the year” Genelle (Genelle Seldon)—pose for the paparazzi, only for Harrington to cut to a master shot of this newsworthy event, which is really just a staged red carpet that’s been constructed in an abandoned parking lot. This entire world’s phoniness is thus laid bare succinctly, and sharply.
That’s not the only pointed thing about Shook’s opening; when her dog pees all over her swanky dress, Genelle rushes off to a nearby bathroom, where she winds up getting stabbed through the chin with her designer high heel shoe. Subsequent headlines indicate that this slaying is related to a spate of recent Southern California attacks by a killer that primarily preys on dogs, and in the aftermath of her colleague’s demise, Mia takes to social media to proclaim, “I’m shook. Seriously.” Given that everything about these individuals is performative bullshit, shook she most certainly is not. In fact, she barely gives it another thought, instead turning her attention to her own dilemma: having to watch her sister Nicole’s (Emily Goss) dog Chico and, in the process, miss out on a big livestream with her boyfriend Santi (Octavius J. Johnson) and friends Lani (Nicola Posener) and Jade (Stephanie Simbari).