If you’ve ever thought, “What if we made a horror movie entirely about the worst people on YouTube, and then… just killed them?”—congrats, you’ve already written #ChadGetsTheAxe in your head.
Travis Bible’s 2022 streamer-bait slasher tries to satirize influencer culture, internet apathy, and parasocial relationships. Instead, it mostly feels like watching a 90-minute live chat where everyone keeps typing “LMAO FAKE” while you slowly regret having a Wi-Fi connection.
Let’s unpack this ring light–illuminated car crash.
Influencers in the Wild (And We Do Mean “Wildly Annoying”)
Our heroes—using that word under protest—are four influencers: Chad, Steve, Jennifer, and Spencer. Their big content idea? Livestream themselves exploring an abandoned house where a Satanic cult once committed ritual murders.
You know. That classic personality trait: trespassing plus trauma exploitation for engagement.
Chad is the main guy, and he’s basically the human version of clickbait: loud, desperate, and weirdly proud of having no dignity left. If he could physically transform into the phrase “SMASH THAT LIKE BUTTON,” he would. The movie wants us to feel a bit for him by the end, but it spends so much time establishing him as irritating that by the time he starts screaming for help, you’re halfway to checking showtimes for something else.
His crew isn’t much better. Steve is That Dude who will disrespect human remains for clout—he literally puts his hat on a corpse. Jennifer and Spencer at least briefly demonstrate common sense by leaving… until Jennifer hears the viewer count is climbing and sprints back like she forgot to promote her discount code.
So yes, the film accurately captures the moral center of influencer culture: somewhere between “nonexistent” and “algorithm-dependent.” Unfortunately, that doesn’t automatically make it compelling to watch.
Found Footage, Lost Potential
On paper, this setup isn’t bad: real-time livestream, creepy murder house, Satanic cult rumors, and a chat full of idiots who can’t tell real from fake. Done well, it could have been a nasty little commentary on how the internet turns everything—fear, pain, death—into content.
Instead, #ChadGetsTheAxe mostly feels like you’re trapped watching a mid-tier horror Twitch stream while someone keeps pausing to scroll the comments.
The film leans hard into the livestream format: vertical frames, pop-up comments, reaction snippets. That could’ve added texture, but it quickly becomes visual clutter. Nothing kills tension faster than a brutal moment being undercut by on-screen comments like:
“This is staged lol”
“Fake af”
“SUB TO MY CHANNEL THO”
We get it. The internet is numb and trashy. So is this movie, coincidentally.
The Cult: Dark Robes, No Personality
The supposed Big Bad is a group of robed cultists, which is horror shorthand for “we didn’t have time to write actual villains.” They’re Satanic, maybe. They’re connected to old murders, sort of. They exist primarily to:
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Knock people out.
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Drag them away.
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Swing an axe.
That’s it. They have all the depth of NPCs in a cheap horror game. There’s no real lore, no unsettling doctrine, not even a good monologue. They’re just vaguely spooky extras in Halloween robes who exist to punish stupid influencers for being stupid on camera.
Which, don’t get me wrong, is cathartic in concept. But after the fifth robed grab-and-drag, you start to wonder if the cult’s real god is Repetition.
The “Nobody Believes Me” Tour
Once Chad finally realizes this isn’t a prank and he’s actually being chopped at by people who aren’t doing this for content, the film briefly flirts with being interesting: he stumbles around, desperately trying to find help, only to be rejected by… everyone.
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Fellow influencers? Hate him.
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Police? Assume it’s a stunt.
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Family? Demand he do favors before they’ll help.
It’s the one segment of the movie that actually has teeth—darkly funny in a “yes, this is exactly how the internet would respond to a live murder” way. Chad is bleeding and panicking, and everyone’s reaction boils down to, “Bro, we’re not falling for your clickbait again.”
The problem is that the movie doesn’t do much with this idea beyond the obvious. There’s no escalation of satire, no deeper commentary. It just goes, “Look, nobody helps him,” for ten minutes and then throws him back at the cult like a particularly whiny boomerang.
Followers IRL: Darwin Award Finalists
Two of Chad’s followers actually decide to help him in person, which is both the dumbest and most believable thing in the film. Of course there are people who would drive to a murder house at night because a guy on their phone told them to.
Their grand plan? Show up. Wander around. Get murdered.
That’s it.
No backup, no weapons, no strategy—just pure, uncut “I can fix him” energy aimed at a man they only know from a livestream. Their deaths are just more body count padding, and any chance to explore parasocial obsession beyond “they’re dumb and dead now” is immediately tossed aside.
The Final Act: Axe, Blood, and Shrug
By the time Chad returns to the house to rescue Jennifer, we’re firmly in “we all know how this ends” territory. Jennifer’s captured, Steve’s somewhere being useless, Spencer comes back just in time to be concussed, and the cult is waiting to solve the influencer crisis with good old-fashioned homicide.
Jennifer tries to warn Chad that there’s more than one robed baddie, which is the kind of revelation that would matter if the film had built any suspense around how many there are, or what they want, or why they care about livestreamers at all. Instead, “there’s more than one” lands like, “there were actually six pizzas, not five.”
The cult murders everyone—Jennifer, Steve, Spencer, Chad—with an efficiency and lack of flourish that would be admirable if it weren’t so utterly flat. Chad’s big death by axe should be the emotional payoff. Instead, it mostly feels like the film finally doing what the title promised so we can all go home.
Credits: Reaction Video Hell
The end credits montage is supposed to be the sharpest piece of satire: a barrage of reaction videos to Chad’s murder stream. People:
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Crying and grieving.
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Assuming it was fake.
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Mocking him.
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Celebrating his death.
This is, admittedly, very on brand for the internet. A man dies on camera, and the biggest response is content about the content. But because the movie itself never gets beyond surface-level takes on influencer culture, this montage doesn’t feel like a knife twist—it just feels like the last five minutes of a Black Mirror episode someone watched once and tried to recreate from memory.
It’s less “wow, what a haunting statement about desensitization” and more “yes, that is indeed what YouTube looks like.”
#NotQuiteIt
The real tragedy of #ChadGetsTheAxe is that there is a sharp, mean, effective movie buried in here somewhere:
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Influencers treating real horror as content.
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An audience unable to distinguish reality from performance.
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A protagonist whose past stunts make his real suffering unbelievable.
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A world where every scream sounds like a thumbnail strategy.
But instead of digging into any of that with bite, the film settles for repetitive gags, loud performances, and a plot that peaks early and then just shuffles bodies around until the runtime gives up.
If you want a background movie where annoying influencers get murdered while the internet proves it shouldn’t be trusted with empathy, this might scratch that very niche itch. Everyone you dislike dies. The end.
But if you were hoping for something actually clever, chilling, or fresh about horror in the age of streaming, #ChadGetsTheAxe is less a brutal indictment of online culture and more the cinematic equivalent of a tired reaction video: a lot of noise, some recycled takes, and a lingering feeling that you probably should’ve watched something else.
