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(Chatt Fest 2026) LENORE and Allison Gunn's HIVE MIND: Investigating Trauma in the Age of Influencers

By. Katelyn Nelson

 

 

 

When you really sit with it, the concept of being a social media influencer—in itself a uniquely modern position with the age-old allure of being the center of attention while raking in money—is one of the most dangerous things to come out of the Internet age. Influencers have been around since the dawn of social media, though the intensity of their spotlight and the idea of it as a viable career have grown exponentially, especially during and after COVID-related lockdowns. At the time, we were all just trying to find ways to connect in what felt like a particularly isolating period. Nowadays, it feels more like we’re paying the price for time spent staring at each other through barriers. We’ve simultaneously internalized those boundaries of contact in the real world (such that it seems like we’re losing the knowledge and ability to interact meaningfully with each other face to face) and broken them down in the digital space so much that many act as though entitled not just to someone’s time, but to their personal intimacies.

There is a subset of type of person on the Internet now who expects both to be shown and told everything and that they should face no consequences for saying or showing anything—even (or especially) something unwanted—in return. The digital landscape, once made with an emphasis on creation, connection, and knowledge sharing, has been dominated by addictive, exploitative tools of manipulation, to such a degree that being off any kind of social media almost equates to being entirely out of the loop of current events. Our creative landscape is suffering for it; if something isn’t going viral on TikTok or Instagram, there are entire departments in most creative industries deeming it entirely unworthy of promoting. Social media is degrading our attention spans and our humanity in one fell swoop. Or it could, if we let it.

But this is not a tirade against social media nor the Internet. Rather, I want to interrogate the current trend of influencer horror, specifically through the lens of two recent works: LENORE, a film which recently played at the 2026 Chattanooga Film Festival and is currently still running the festival circuit, and HIVE MIND, a novel by Allison Gunn due to be released in April of 2027. LENORE is a Poe-inspired, slow burn nightmare directed by David Ward and written by Ward and Josie Hess. Taking a page from Satoshi Kon’s PERFECT BLUE, it centers around the disappearance of a controversial influencer and the terminally online Max Wren (Nicholas Jaquinot), a man obsessed with finding answers and information about his untouchable figure of obsession, the titular Lenore (Ruby Duncan). To get too deep into discussions of plot for this film risks spoiling a singularly unsettling experience, so instead we’ll do some dancing around the points. To study Poe is to study the literary obsession with mythically idolized women. Women so venerated as to be untouchable in all but the mind of the worshipper—regardless of how they might be in the real world. Jaquinot’s turn as Max Wren is intensely unsettling, not least because of his ability to appear equally near-sympathetic and deeply, deeply troubled. Pair that with his birdlike movements and you’ve got the perfect Poe-tagonist. Opposite the figure of Max Wren, Ruby Duncan’s enigmatic Lenore is magnetic; their interplay is an irresistible torment. She seems controversial in part because she is so open with her darker emotions—even if they are heightened for the camera, it is done in such a way as to make her feel as approachable as the inter-film media would have you believe she is repulsive. Her most well-known scandal—not to be revealed here—is almost unthinkably horrific, as is its fallout.

Horror has long explored the dangers of obsession, even when it takes very different forms. OBSESSION similarly examines the stories people construct around desire, identity, and the impossible pursuit of control.

With all this in play, LENORE turns into an exploration of feminine rage and obsessive possession with twists that feel as fresh as they are gut-wrenching. While there are more than a few overt references to some of Poe’s most popular work, what makes the film so effective as an homage is its ability to capture the spirit and atmosphere of his style, leaving you pondering over it long after the credits roll.

Both LENORE and Allison Gunn’s HIVE MIND center complicated women in the modern spotlight and the men who wish above all else to shape and control their narratives for themselves, though HIVE MIND is somewhat less about obsession in the Poe-etic sense of putting your lover on a pedestal to be worshipped as a holy figure of equal parts adoration and fear, and more about obsession with control and power. It’s a nesting doll of struggle, wherein nearly every single character we encounter is grappling to control not just the situation they have been thrust into—flipping the court of public opinion in the case of the graphic murder of controversial influencer Bee Torrance away from despising her manager-turned -husband Jacob Peyton to something a little more sympathetic. Even if it means digging into Bee’s past and trying to turn her avid Hive against her. Rather, everyone we meet is also trying to make sure they put their most successful front forward, burying the sordid elements of their past they would rather forget even as a force beyond their control forces them to reckon with it head on. It’s a story of survival through possession-of-self that uses the feeling of losing that control to highlight its value.

Both journalists charged with spinning the sympathetic spotlight on Jacob and consequently casting a villainous light on the dead woman are immediately out of their depth and only sink deeper as the story progresses. It’s Appalachian horror at its most propulsive, fueled—just like LENORE—by the tension between feminine rage and masculine insecurity. The descriptions of Bee’s death and life in the hands of Jacob Peyton are disturbingly graphic in distinct but interrelated ways that make it both virtually unputdownable and maybe something you don’t want to be the last thing you read at night. Everyone in these pages will be forced to face their most uncomfortable truths as many times as it takes them to learn something from it, and soon the distinction between reality and nightmares is blurred to near nothing. HIVE MIND is a remarkably dark, twisting novel of what it means to face your demons when your life has been so long in the public eye. A deflation of ego, a reckoning, and, in some senses, a kind of release.

LENORE and HIVE MIND have absolutely nothing to do with one another. The tie that binds them is simply one of timing. The world has been interrogating and using influencer horror as a lens for storytelling for the last few years, after all, so even the framing may not seem novel. Except. Where most works I have seen or read in the last few years that explore this realm do so merely as a frame device to tell a different sort of story altogether, these two are most interested in centering and dissecting the connection between the influencer and the audience, in one case, and the system bent on controlling her, in the other.

The internet may have created influencers, but horror has always understood the terror of turning women into symbols instead of people. WICKER explores that struggle through a fairy-tale lens, following a woman who refuses to let tradition (or anyone else) decide who she's allowed to become.

LENORE is still on the festival circuit; HIVE MIND will be released from Atria Books on April 27, 2027.