Podcasts
‘Influencer’ Explores the Connection Between Manipulation and Murder [The Lady Killers Podcast]
Most of us have a love-hate relationship with social media. Yes, our phones provide hours of entertainment and allow us to connect with the larger world, but the proliferation of social media also fosters harmful comparisons and can leave us feeling inferior to bare acquaintances and outright strangers. And that’s to say nothing of influencer culture. This brand of salesmanship revolves around glamorous social media personalities who draw our attention to products and practices. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with this form of subtle marketing, the line between genuine truth and paid sponsorship can be frighteningly thin. Kurtis David Harder plays with the deadly consequences of social media reach with Influencer, a psychological thriller set in a gorgeous locale. While vacationing in Thailand, three different types of female influencers collide in a deadly game of manipulation and death.
Madison (Emily Tennant) is a social media star traveling on her own after her boyfriend and quasi-manager Ryan (Rory J Saper) backed out of the trip. Frustrated and lonely, she considers ending the relationship and seems to have misgivings about her demanding job. CW (Cassandra Naud), a mysterious woman also staying at the resort, feels like a breath of fresh air. The two women become fast friends and when Madison’s passport is stolen, she agrees to stay at CW’s luxurious inland home. But an overnight trip to an island getaway goes horrifically wrong and Madison finds herself stranded and alone. Having left Madison for dead, CW takes over her popular account and enjoys the perks of her many sponsorship deals. But will her next victim be so easy to influence and will Ryan let his girlfriend disappear without a trace?
The Lady Killers continue Hot Girl Summer with a luxurious trip to a tropical resort. Co-hosts Jenn Adams, Sammie Kuykendall, and Mae Shults discuss the finer points of title card design, Cassandra Naud’s incredible performance, and their own experience with parasocial relationships. Would they each feel comfortable traveling alone? Why does Madison fall for CW’s tricks? Is Ryan a villain or hero and what kind of hashtag should you use with a teddy bear selfie? They’ll scroll through the answers to these questions and more while exploring the power – and danger – of influencer culture.
Stream below and subscribe now via Apple Podcasts and Spotify for future episodes that drop every Thursday.
Multi-award-winning and unapologetically cinematic UK band The Last Dinner Party have always seemed drawn to the places where opposites collide. Beauty and violence. Grief and ecstasy. The sacred and the grotesque. It’s there in their music, performances, and in the worlds they’ve built around themselves since the band’s earliest days.
Their songs often feel less like traditional rock music and more like myths in motion, unfolding somewhere between a dream, a film, and a fevered memory. Perhaps that’s why horror feels so naturally at home within their creative universe.
For Abigail Morris, the group’s charismatic ringleader, some of horror’s most enduring filmmakers understand that terror becomes more powerful when it exists alongside beauty.
Discussing the work of Dario Argento, she points to films like Suspiria and Phenomena as perfect examples of that tension.
“I think it’s actually the proximity of those things rather than the distance,” Morris explains. “The things that are really beautiful and the things that are really terrifying. It’s like the idea of the sublime. The closer that beauty is to terror, the more beautiful it is and the more terrifying it is rather than the juxtaposition. I think that that’s where the sweet spot of fear and tension and intrigue and pure and real beauty is, where it’s almost the other. And I think that’s what Argento does really well with the sort of the beautiful casting and the sets and the lighting and then the buckets of red blood.”
She cites Argento’s ability to place stunning imagery directly beside the grotesque or unsettling. The vivid colors, dreamlike sets, and beautiful performers suddenly interrupted by buckets of blood, swarms of insects, or moments of genuine nightmare.
“I love how he plays with that,” she says.
That fascination with contradiction extends far beyond horror films. The Last Dinner Party’s work frequently occupies a similar emotional space, where longing can feel catastrophic, and heartbreak transforms into mythology. Morris brings up one of her favorites, Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession (1981), as another example of horror expressing emotional truths more accurately than realism ever could.
“A divorce is a very human thing that happens,” she says. “And then to turn that into this psychological body, spiritual, eldritch horror is how it must feel to go through a divorce. And it’s more accurate.”
Not surprisingly, news of the upcoming Possession remake sparked a passionate response. “I’m fucking furious,” Morris laughs. While generally skeptical of remakes, she makes an exception for Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria, praising the filmmaker for creating something entirely his own rather than attempting to recreate Argento’s original.
“He wasn’t trying to capture the energy of Argento’s film. It felt like a story in its own right.” She goes on to explain, “…if they do that with Possession, then I’m interested.”
The conversation also reveals just how deeply cinema has been embedded into The Last Dinner Party from the very beginning. Long before sold-out shows and award nominations, the band envisioned themselves not simply as musicians but as architects of an entire world.
“When we started the band, the visuals were of equal importance to the music,” Morris says. “Before we played a show, before we shot a music video, we decided that what we wanted this band to be was something that was a complete world.”
That commitment led to elaborate mood boards, film references, styling concepts, and even a 72-page presentation that helped define the band’s visual identity before many people had ever heard a note of their music.
For composer, songwriter, and keyboardist Aurora Nishevci, many of those same cinematic instincts have begun finding new outlets. She speaks passionately about the horror scores that continue to inspire her, including the work of Mica Levi and Hildur Guðnadóttir. Rather than relying solely on traditional horror techniques, she is fascinated by artists willing to challenge expectations.
“You can decide to go the traditional route,” Nishevci says. “Or you can completely go another way and still be terrifying.”
That fascination has now become something more personal. Nishevci reveals that she is currently working on her first horror feature as a composer, bringing her own musical language into the genre that has influenced her for years.
The band’s connection to horror has also found an unexpected audience among fans of Yellowjackets. Online, edits pairing The Last Dinner Party’s music with scenes from the series have become increasingly common. At concerts, fans have even begun holding up photos of Jackie during performances of “Woman Is a Tree.”
At first, Morris couldn’t understand what she was seeing.
“I thought it was someone’s grandma,” she says. Only later did she realize the mysterious photographs were actually tributes to one of the show’s most beloved characters. “It’s fucking Jackie from Yellowjackets!”
The band enthusiastically express interest in seeing those worlds collide one day.
While The Last Dinner Party’s future remains unwritten, horror seems destined to remain part of it. Asked what creative paths still excite them, Morris immediately begins dreaming beyond albums and tours.
“We’ll do a horror movie as well.”
Nishevci quickly adds another possibility that has apparently been living on the band’s mood board for some time. “We keep talking about doing a folk horror EP.” “That’s been on the mood board,” Morris confirms.
For a band already obsessed with mythology, ritual, transformation, storytelling, beauty, and terror, both ideas feel less like surprises and more like inevitable next chapters. For much more with Abigail Morris and Aurora Nishevci, including further musings on Argento, Possession, Salò, Hausu, and the future of The Last Dinner Party, check out The Boo Crew Podcast Episode 473 available now on Apple, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts.
The band joins Olivia Rodrigo on the road next year for multiple sold-out residencies in New York and LA. Follow the Last Dinner Party on Instagram.