Influencer Horror is all the rage these days. Especially on the indie circuit, the subgenre is easy to tap into and exploit for some good frights. And who doesn’t love to see the most insufferable people on the internet be killed? With his film, Strawstalker (review), writer/director/actor George Henry Horton goes for a deliciously silly take on the classic influencer story. Over a recent Zoom call, the filmmaker discussed the potential for a sequel, AI, getting the stunts just right, and what he has coming next!
What’s so great about your film is that it knows exactly what it is: campy satire. Did you ever consider approaching Strawstalker with a more serious tone?
Well, first of all, I read your review, and I really appreciate it because that was almost like the perfect review to read. It’s exactly what we were going for. So, I guess to answer your question, when you have a killer scarecrow and influencers, you have to lean into the silliness. I know a lot of found footage movies can be quite dark and serious, and I guess it’s a little more unusual in that sense. I love to make movies that are fun. I don’t think I can help myself. My background was in comedy, so it’s always going to have a little bit of fun.
I’m always game for skewering influencers, and that comes from someone who follows a lot of content creators on TikTok. How did you develop this idea?
It honestly came from just feeling like scarecrows don’t get enough love in horror. I started watching found footage movies with gusto, maybe six months before we made the movie. And I was like, ‘I really would love to do that. I think this is such a fun way of making a movie.’ And then, I’m a bit of a history buff. LA was all agricultural land back in the day. I was trying to figure out how a scarecrow movie could work and still shoot it at my house, which I was like, how on earth is that going to make sense?
Then I realized this house, before it was built, was on farmland. It all fell into place in a really organic way like that. It felt like a sign to go ahead with it, essentially. Part of casting myself in the movie, I felt that when you have found footage, there’s a lot of interesting and intricate camera movements, especially because we have stunts and stuff, and I felt like I would be losing my mind if actors were not quite getting the camera movements I had them in my head. If I do it, then I can be mad at myself, and the DP can just yell at me, which he did. [laughs] So, it worked out nicely, I think. And then I was like, okay, I guess I’ve got to be a British influencer, since I can’t do a very good American accent. [laughs]
What found footage films did you watch?
I watched a bunch, but just to single out some really awesome ones: ‘[Rec],’ ‘Creep,’ and ‘Creep 2’ are probably the biggest references. I really appreciate ‘V/H/S’ because you get so many different kinds of iterations of found footage with that franchise.
Out of all the horror subgenres, found footage is always scarier than the others.
If you do it well, the audience quickly finds themselves really feeling like they’re in it. If it’s a POV shot, there’s that element of feeling like you are in the film. And especially now with the rise of AI, I just feel like found footage is going to have a bit of a renaissance. It’s the closest thing you have to virtual reality, as part of a more traditional cinema. You’re not going to have to light it in a crazily complicated way because the lights will get caught on camera. It has to feel very naturalistic.
You mention AI. I’m curious what your experience has been in the indie filmmaker bubble.
People have very strong opinions. I would love for it to just be a tool in our arsenal, and that’s it. But it seems pretty obvious that people are going to use it to generate an entire film. I saw an article today that there’s a whole film at Tribeca that’s AI. I don’t know. I think the temperature is very cautionary, and people’s emotions are running high.
Scarestalker also has plenty of legit frights in it. How did you balance the silliness and the scares?
The great thing about making a movie that’s fun and also has scares is that it puts people in a kind of false sense of security. When I watched the movie in the theater, I was, first of all, absolutely terrified. But it played a lot funnier and a lot scarier than I could ever really hope for. But in a way, that worked really well. People are laughing one second and then gasping three seconds later. It’s like a roller coaster.
In much of your work, you’ve always worn both the writer and director hats. Was this process any different than what you’d done previously?
It was very different in the sense that a lot of it was improv, which I’ve done before, but not to this scale. The other lead actor, Branika [Scott], who plays Haley, stayed at the location. During our off hours, we were able to sort of run the script, run the scenes, talk about the scenes, and then on the day, as long as the blocking worked and we had to get from point A to point B, whatever was said in the scene, if that felt right, we could move on. The nice thing about found footage is you don’t have to worry about coverage and matching your lines.
Let’s say you do one shot where all the dialogue is one way, and then the next take, it’s all another way. That’s totally fine because you don’t have to match cut in any kind of way. You just choose the best take, maybe jump cut, and use bits of each one. But I really like found footage because it does feel almost like a play in the sense that it doesn’t matter if the lines change a little bit each time.
Were there any sequences or moments that were more difficult than others to get right?
Because a lot of the time, the stunts were happening to the person holding the camera, so sometimes you have someone crawling around like Gollum, ready to catch the camera when it would fall from a stunt. If we were trying to show a stunt on camera, the camera had to feel like it was put down in a way that didn’t feel forced. There were stunts where, like, the camera’s on the ground, so I literally would drop it, but someone will be there to catch it and make sure it’s pointing in a good direction to catch the right frame.
One of the stunt guys was in his 60s, and he’s like, ‘I’ve never done this. This is so exciting to figure out how we’re going to make this work.’ And also seeing 360, you can’t hide anything. You can’t pad and all sorts of other things to be really clear about how he hid the safety aspects of it. Yeah.
Scarecrows remind me a lot of mannequins. They’re just inherently creepy, especially when the scarecrow was moving frame to frame. Were those moments difficult?
There’s one scene where they go in the backyard, and the scarecrow moves. The camera would turn to look, and we’d have to make it make sense in the story for the camera to move in a way that would allow someone to dive from behind the hedge, move it, and then dive back behind the hedge. Sometimes, there was someone in there, and they would do it themselves. I hope that we got away with that. But you’re right. I actually have a mannequin script I’d love to make one day.
Did you have any influencers in mind when writing this script?
We watched a lot of videos of influencers, but it was more just trying to get as many ideas from all sorts of different folks as possible. I’ll be honest, it was a while ago now, so I couldn’t really point at one in particular. Obviously, we looked at a lot of couple influencers and stuff like that. I used to have a YouTube prank channel before I moved to LA, so I guess it was a foray into being very irritating online.
You really open this film up into something much bigger by the third act. Was that always the plan?
I had so many different versions of how this scarecrow movie. I actually wrote a whole other script. It wasn’t found footage. I came to the conclusion that it would be cool to build a bigger world so that I would have opportunities to shoot this anywhere. It’s the Scarecrow of Oak Bridge—this particular area is called Oak Bridge. But there’s nothing that says this could be the only one. There could be people all over the world worshiping this thing. I just love the idea of potentially having a whole world of strawstalkers. That was my mindset, and then it made sense just in the context of the agricultural aspect of LA that these folks have just remained with their traditions in this fantastical world.
Would you ever do a sequel?
Yes. It’s funny. When we did the screening, Branika was like, ‘What if we do one where I’m going to go save you?’ What I really love about the movie is that she is really the badass. She’s the one constantly driving the fight back. She’s the one who’s saving. Even on the set, Branika was so tough. There’s a scene where she whacks her hand into a window to get attention from the outside world. She actually breaks the glass, the real glass, with her hand. I call cut, and she’s like, ‘No, no, keep rolling. This stuff’s great.’
Yes, to answer your question, I would love to do a sequel. I don’t know if it’d be the same characters or the same place or whether it would just be somewhere else.
You mentioned earlier that you have a comedy background. What kind of training do have, and what kind of actor are you in terms of the method school of acting?
I just fell into this YouTube troop when I was back in college, and we just learned by doing. I’ve always loved fantasy, and I was always the kid who wore costumes and stuff when I was little. I’ve just always loved to play, I guess. That sounds really pretentious. [laughs] I’ve done a couple of acting classes. One thing I actually would love to do moving forward is to do more classic acting classes and also maybe get a good American accent going so I can open up roles a little bit.
You have three upcoming films. What can you say about those?
I have a movie that I shot in Arkansas last year called ‘Send a Scare.’ I’m a producer on that, and that’s really fun. It’s sort of like if you could send a haunted house to someone’s house. I started shooting another monster found footage movie. I’m going to finish that up hopefully this summer. I’m trying to actually build a bit of a monster universe. I know that Universal keeps trying to do this, but I’m like, ‘Why don’t we do an indie found footage Monsters universe?’ I have no idea if that’s going to work. [laughs]
We can have everything, and people can enjoy whatever they want. But I do love the Scarecrow. It’s got a place in my heart. I also have a couple of other features that we’re wrapping up right now. I keep doing these found footage movies. [laughs] Another one is actually another found footage monster movie. I don’t want to give away what the monster is because that’s the reveal. But that one will be premiering at a festival this summer. It’s all very exciting.
Strawstalker is out now on VOD.
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