End-to-end, 2025 has been a spectacular year for horror movies. Every single month has delivered winners from the genre, from Companion and The Monkey in January and February, to 28 Years Later and Together in June and July, to Black Phone 2 and Predator: Badlands in October and November. Needless to say, it would be an extreme bummer if the calendar were to flip to the next page without some kind of grand finale – and the good news is that fans of discerning taste don’t have to settle for just Five Nights at Freddy’s 2.
We need to talk about writer/director Kurtis David Harder’s Influencers.
In 2023, I used CinemaBlend’s ranking of the year’s best horror movies to proselytize the devilish and clever horror movie Influencer, the new movie’s predecessor, and if you have not yet had the pleasure of enjoying that bit of cinematic wickedness, I am here to tell you that you are presently at a significant disadvantage in your pop culture awareness. It’s a film that you very much need to catch up on, as the new sequel – which just arrived on Shudder this month – is not only one of the best horror sequels of the year, but one of my favorite films of 2025, period.
Explaining too much of the story would be a mistake for the uninitiated, but the great hook of both films is Cassandra Naud’s CW – a killer with a fiendish M.O. Cool, beautiful and enigmatic, she is a tech-savvy con artist with a knack for charming vapid social media influencers whom she meets while staying in far-flung locales. Once she is able to successfully earn their trust, she lures them to a trap that will mean their doom, and then she uses her computer skills to make all the evidence disappear.
It’s sinister social commentary that deftly avoids ever feeling mean-spirited, and what makes the movies particularly exceptional is the way in which they successfully play cat-and-mouse and scramble your moral barometer. CW is a bona fide psychopath who clearly gets a lot of joy out of the pain and death she causes… but the magic touch of Harder and Naud reaches the darkest, sickest part of your soul and makes you involuntarily grin as she narrowly circumvents obstacles and danger that could spell an end to her fun.
It’s almost ghoulish to describe, but you want her to be within an inch of being caught… but then for her to miraculously escape. This is the great strength of Influencer, but it’s enhanced in all the best ways for Influencers, with CW finding the Sherlock to her Moriarty and converging paths for both of the characters leading to a perfectly bloody finale.
Anyone aiming to see all the best new horror on offer in 2025 would fail in their mission without consideration of Influencers, and the internet makes it very easy to rectify that circumstance. If you haven’t seen Influencer, the movie is now available to stream with either a Netflix subscription or a Shudder subscription, and once you watch it, I promise that you’ll be instantly motivated to head over to Shudder and hit play on the brilliant sequel.
