The Devil Went Viral
There was a time when horror movies terrified us with monsters lurking in the shadows. In Followed, the monster is a Wi-Fi-enabled narcissist with a ring light. And somehow—it works. Antoine Le’s debut feature turns influencer culture into both a punchline and a nightmare, a YouTube séance disguised as a found-footage film that manages to be smarter, scarier, and funnier than it has any right to be.
Imagine The Blair Witch Project if the filmmakers had monetized their trauma, or Paranormal Activity with a sponsorship deal from Squarespace. That’s Followed: a found-footage horror movie for the age of followers, filters, and fatal algorithms.
The Plot: Livestreaming from Hell
The movie unfolds through a single computer screen—a chaotic, modern-day confessional booth filled with tabs, DMs, and livestreams. Our antihero is DropTheMike (Matthew Solomon), a smug, fast-talking vlogger who specializes in shock content. He’s the kind of influencer who’d probably do an unboxing video of a cursed artifact.
When he’s offered a $250,000 sponsorship deal—because the devil always pays well—Mike decides to spend Halloween weekend vlogging from the Lennox Hotel, a cursed Los Angeles landmark notorious for suicides, murders, and one very haunted elevator. You know, a normal Airbnb weekend.
He brings along his loyal, increasingly traumatized crew: Chris, a religious cameraman; Dani, his long-suffering sound operator; and Nic, his editor who looks one jump scare away from filing for PTSD benefits. Together, they descend into the world’s least safe hotel, hoping for clicks and clout but finding curses and corpses instead.
The setup sounds familiar—people explore a haunted place, bad things happen—but the execution is sharp, self-aware, and unsettlingly believable. The scares unfold entirely through the laptop interface: camera feeds, YouTube comments, glitchy livestreams, and frantic messages. It’s a digital séance, and we’re the ghosts watching.
Influencer Hell: A Horror Subgenre Is Born
DropTheMike is the perfect modern horror protagonist: likable enough to watch, hateable enough to deserve whatever supernatural punishment awaits. He’s every online personality rolled into one—equal parts Logan Paul, Casey Neistat, and “that guy who faked a breakup for views.”
The brilliance of Followed lies in how it weaponizes internet culture. Every click, notification, and follower count becomes a source of tension. When Mike’s subscriber numbers start spiking after something terrible happens, he’s too busy celebrating the analytics to notice the dead woman in the background.
The film skewers the influencer mindset with surgical precision. The more haunted things get, the more determined Mike is to keep filming. Because in the online economy, tragedy is just good engagement. Even when blood drips down the screen, you can practically hear the brand deals calling.
And that’s what makes Followed genuinely chilling: it’s not just about ghosts haunting a hotel—it’s about our obsession with turning everything, even our own doom, into content.
The Horror: #HauntedForTheLikes
Unlike many found-footage films that rely on shaky cam and loud noises, Followed crafts its scares with eerie subtlety. A figure appears in a reflection. A notification pops up from someone who’s been dead for days. A video feed glitches, and for a split second, the viewer sees something they shouldn’t.
Director Antoine Le uses the limitations of the “screenlife” format (think Unfriended or Searching) as a playground, not a prison. The result is claustrophobic, clever, and genuinely unsettling. Watching a character’s fate unfold through buffering videos and livestream comments gives you the unnerving sense that you’re complicit—just another viewer feeding the algorithm.
And then there’s the Lennox Hotel itself. A fictionalized stand-in for L.A.’s infamous Cecil Hotel, it oozes history, decay, and digital doom. Every corridor is a glitching hallway of horrors. Every elevator ride feels like scrolling too far down a cursed subreddit.
Performances: The Undead and the Overconfident
Matthew Solomon’s performance as DropTheMike is pitch-perfect. He plays him with the manic energy of a man who hasn’t logged off since 2012. He’s charismatic enough to make you believe people would actually subscribe to this nonsense, but shallow enough that you start rooting for the ghosts by the halfway point.
The supporting cast holds their own in the chaos. Sam Valentine’s Dani delivers dry, deadpan realism amid the absurdity—she’s the one person who seems aware that filming a ghost in 4K might not be worth your life. Tim Drier as Chris adds a layer of tragic earnestness, playing the skeptical believer whose faith is tested by one too many floating corpses.
But it’s the chemistry between the group—part dysfunctional production team, part doomed YouTube squad—that gives the movie heart. When things start going wrong (and boy, do they), their reactions feel natural: denial, panic, and the occasional “Let’s just get the shot first.”
Direction: Found Footage, Refound Purpose
Antoine Le’s direction deserves major credit. Found-footage horror is one of the most overused formats in cinema, but Followed proves it’s not dead—just waiting for a software update.
Le builds suspense not with gore but with timing, using screen-based storytelling to blur reality. When a creepy video starts auto-playing, you feel the instinctive dread of every internet user who’s ever had a pop-up scare the life out of them. It’s horror built on recognition: the familiar dread of modern connectivity.
The pacing is sharp, too. The film wastes no time with filler—it starts fast, stays tense, and doesn’t stop until the final hauntingly brilliant twist that ties the entire digital nightmare together.
Social Commentary: #CancelCultureMeetsSatan
Beneath the jump scares and cursed livestreams, Followed has teeth. It’s a commentary on the influencer era—our obsession with attention, our hunger for validation, and the moral rot that grows under the glow of a ring light.
Mike’s descent into madness mirrors our collective addiction to being seen. The film asks a disturbingly relevant question: if the internet offered you fame in exchange for your soul, how many followers would it take for you to say yes?
By the end, when Mike’s final livestream goes off the rails in demonic fashion, the movie achieves something remarkable—it makes possession look like the logical next step in online branding.
Dark Humor: Death by Algorithm
What keeps Followed from sinking into bleak nihilism is its razor-sharp sense of humor. The movie knows its protagonist is a walking meme, and it leans into it. There’s something perversely funny about watching a man film his own supernatural demise while shouting, “Smash that like button!”
Even the film’s structure is laced with irony. The entire movie is being watched by an anonymous user—someone clicking through Mike’s old vlogs, ignoring frantic messages, and leaving cryptic comments. In the end, we realize the viewer is not just part of the story, but part of the curse. Which, frankly, is the most realistic depiction of the internet yet.
Final Thoughts: Log Out Before the Ghosts Find You
Followed is that rare horror film that manages to be both a fun scare-fest and a bleak satire of modern media. It’s clever, creepy, and full of bite—not just from the ghosts, but from its scathing portrayal of influencer obsession.
It’s a movie that reminds us: we’re all one bad decision away from becoming content. And sometimes, the most cursed thing of all isn’t the haunted hotel—it’s the comment section.
So if you ever feel tempted to livestream from a cursed location for clicks, remember DropTheMike’s final words: “I’ll be taking a break from social media.”
Yeah, buddy. A permanent one.
Final Rating: ★★★★☆
(Four out of five haunted Wi-Fi signals — one for the inventive direction, one for the sharp satire, one for the unsettling scares, and one for reminding us that the algorithm always gets the last laugh.)
