The Influencer Project

EVERYONE IS WATCHING. ONE PERSON IS TOO CLOSE.

Chiara King makes a living being watched.

That is the job.

Millions of people follow her online, seeing the photographs, videos, opinions and fragments of daily life she chooses to put in front of them.

In Mike Nybroe’s The Influencer Project, someone decides that isn’t enough.

Chiara—playing a fictionalized version of herself—travels to Copenhagen with a documentary crew that wants to capture what exists behind the polished surface of online celebrity. The promise is simple:

No filter.

No secrets.

An intimate look at the person behind the account. 

Then somebody else begins following along.

An obsessive stalker starts tracking Chiara’s movements.

The cameras keep recording.

And what was supposed to be documentary material begins changing into something closer to evidence. 

That is where The Influencer Project updates one of horror’s most familiar forms.

Found footage once required a reason for somebody to carry a camera.

A documentary.

A home movie.

A news crew.

An investigation.

Today, the camera barely requires explanation.

It is already in your pocket.

It is pointed at your face.

It knows where you are.

And if your career depends on keeping an audience informed about your life, sometimes you are the one supplying the map.

The movie comes from Danish filmmaker Mike Nybroe, making his feature directorial debut after a career primarily in commercial filmmaking. He co-wrote the screenplay with Anders Jon Petersen and Lars Andreas Pedersen. 

But one of the names behind the project immediately changes the context.

Actually, two of them do.

Eduardo Sánchez and Gregg Hale, key producers behind The Blair Witch Project, produced The Influencer Projectalongside Mike Nybroe, Alex Hertzberg and Ahmet Zappa. 

That connection is not incidental marketing.

The new film is consciously returning to the found-footage form that Blair Witch helped popularize, but putting the camera into a completely different cultural moment.

In 1999, recovered video was frightening partly because nobody expected ordinary people to document every second of their lives.

In 2026, the opposite is true.

We expect footage.

Stories.

Livestreams.

Location tags.

Selfies.

Behind-the-scenes access.

The absence of documentation can sometimes feel stranger than its presence.

That shift is exactly what the movie’s campaign emphasizes. FANGORIA’s first-look coverage describes the film as examining how the iPhone and influencer culture have changed found footage and horror itself. 

And Chiara King makes the premise unusually slippery.

She isn't simply an actress playing an invented influencer.

She is an actual creator with a substantial online audience, playing a fictionalized version of herself. 

That does not mean Friday Night VHS should present the story as a documentary.

It is fiction.

But the movie deliberately borrows pieces of King’s real public identity so that viewers have to keep recalibrating the boundary between performer and character.

The campaign goes further still, describing the film as influenced by actual events. 

That phrase deserves restraint.

We should not turn it into “based on a true story.”

The official language does not say that.

It says influenced by actual events.

And contemporary Danish coverage notes that King herself has dealt with stalkers in real life, which gives the fictional scenario an uncomfortable real-world echo without making the film a literal recreation of one documented case. 

That distinction matters.

A story does not need to reproduce one crime exactly to understand a fear that already exists.

For an influencer, attention is currency.

More viewers can mean more reach.

More engagement.

More opportunity.

But the system cannot guarantee that every person watching you understands the boundary between access and ownership.

A follower sees your breakfast.

Then your hotel.

Then your street.

Then your location.

Eventually, one person decides the relationship is more intimate than it actually is.

The film’s own synopsis builds itself around that transformation:

follower → predator.

That is the horror engine. 

The broader ensemble includes Luca Storm, Mike Nybroe, Jazmine Summer and Alexandre Willaume alongside King. Jazmine Summer plays Alice, a role independently confirmed through her professional casting profile. 

Behind the camera, Daniel Parmo served as cinematographer, while Anders Jon Petersen edited the film. 

And Copenhagen is not merely where the story is set.

The film was actually shot there. IMDb’s production record identifies Copenhagen as the filming location, while the Danish release campaign treats the city as central to the movie’s identity. 

That creates another collision between what is staged and what is real.

Real influencer.

Real city.

Real phones.

Real forms of online exposure.

Fictional nightmare.

The film runs 95 minutes in its U.S. theatrical listing and is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for strong bloody violence, suicide, and language throughout. 

Hades Films opens The Influencer Project in U.S. theaters on October 2, 2026. The current launch is best treated as a limited theatrical release, based on both the initial release-calendar announcement and current Rotten Tomatoes classification. 

So today, September 12, its Friday Night VHS status is:

COMING SOON.

And because the movie has not opened yet, this is where we stop.

We know Chiara goes to Copenhagen.

We know a documentary crew follows her.

We know an obsessed follower begins closing in.

We know the footage stops feeling like content and starts feeling like evidence.

We do not need to guess who the stalker is, how the attacks unfold, what the ending reveals, or which moments advertised as “real” belong to the fiction.

That uncertainty is part of the movie’s design.

Because the most unsettling thing about The Influencer Project may not be that somebody is watching Chiara.

Everybody is watching Chiara.

The problem is that one of them thinks watching makes him part of her life.