“If you step into an influencer sphere, people feel like, ‘Well, you’re making a spectacle of yourself. I can do anything I want — because you asked for this.’”

So warns a voice of wisdom in the IndieWire-exclusive first trailer for “The Influencer Project,” an upcoming found-footage film starring British content creator Chiara King as a fictionalized version of herself. With 4.2 million followers consuming King’s beauty, dating, and lifestyle content on TikTok (she’s got another 1.4 million on Instagram), that sentiment captures the insidious bargain at the heart of the modern world’s most sought-after career.

Directed by Danish filmmaker Mike Nybroe, “The Influencer Project” follows King to Copenhagen, where a documentary crew is ostensibly shooting an unfiltered look at the business of online fame. But once you decide to make one part of your life public, how long before the strangers who like you on the internet decide the rest belongs to them, too?

As King shares her work with the cameras and audience, an obsessive stalker starts tracking her movements from behind his own powerful screen. Soon, the production’s footage looks less like viral content than evidence of a violent crime. And while that escalation may be fictional (or, at least, partly fictional here), the vulnerability beneath it is not: A 2023 study found that more than 70 percent of surveyed influencers had experienced online harassment or toxic criticism. Women, meanwhile, remain especially vulnerable to the stalking and sexual harassment that can migrate from digital spaces into real life.

A striking addition to the rising wave of Gen Z horror, “The Influencer Project” will arrive in theaters internationally on October 2 from Hades Films, Point Neuf, and Voltron Global Media. The project marks King’s feature acting debut. It’s also the first theatrical release from Hades Films, an emerging horror label founded by lifelong friends Alex Hertzberg and Ahmet Zappa.

For King, the film represented an opportunity to not just translate her online charisma into feature acting, but to reclaim some of the power that can disappear when a creator becomes the object of someone else’s obsession.

“I didn’t want to make a classic movie where the main character is just a helpless victim and is running away from the predator,” King told IndieWire. “I wanted to tell a story about standing in your power, taking my control back, facing that terror head-on, and speaking my voice in a way that breaks the mold of the victim.”

King attended London’s Sylvia Young Theatre School as a child and appeared in musicals at local theaters before building her career online. Making comedy sketches every day allowed her to keep flexing those same creative muscles, but the promise of a full-blown psychological horror movie about her real work offered a new (and unexpectedly personal) challenge.

“I was just waiting for the right project that I believed in to come through,” she said. “This film was the best opportunity for me to explore completely new but also familiar emotions, as horror is a genre I’ve never explored before.”

That fish-out-of-water feeling clashing with King’s obvious digital expertise became central to the story’s slippery construction. “The Influencer Project” was very much shaped by true events in King’s life, but it isn’t presenting a literal record of them. Instead, the shoot was designed to see reality and cinema collide in ways that allowed genuine fear to seep into King’s mostly fictional ordeal — making it genuinely difficult to tell where the real person ends and the performance begins.

That ambiguity immediately hooked Hades Films after Hertzberg and Zappa saw Nybroe and King’s proof of concept.

“We instantly thought she was an incredible talent,” Hertzberg told IndieWire. “But when we learned that she had personally been stalked, that’s when we pulled in the ‘Blair Witch’ creators.”

“The thing that initially drew us to ‘The Influencer Project’ was Chiara’s performance,” producers Eduardo Sánchez and Gregg Hale, both known for the infamous 1999 Maryland haunting, said in a joint statement. They described it as “raw and powerful” and said it “felt very much like reality.”

Sánchez and Hale helped develop Nybroe’s approach, bringing with them the improvisational methods that made “The Blair Witch Project” a found-footage landmark.

“It blurred the lines of ‘Is this real?’ in a way that felt very ‘Blair Witch’ to us,” Sánchez and Hale said. “Plus, Mike [Nybroe] was utilizing basically the same kinds of improvisational techniques we used on ‘Blair.’ The projects felt very much like siblings from the outset.”

Rather than handing King a conventional script for every scene, the production routinely gave her just enough information to establish where the story needed to go. Then, the route she took to get there — and the fear she experienced along the way — was discovered in real time.

“This is how you do ‘Blair Witch’ now,” Sánchez and Hale told Hertzberg.

As a debut feature director, Nybroe had been dreaming of that sort of experiment for years. After a career directing commercials for the Danish market, he reached the uncomfortable realization that no one was going to give him permission to make the leap to feature filmmaking.

“I looked at myself in the mirror and realized that if I was ever going to achieve my dreams, I just had to start doing it,” Nybroe told IndieWire. Within months, he was shooting a pilot about an influencer who arrives in Copenhagen and attracts the attention of “a seriously spooky guy.”

The Danish film industry repeatedly passed on the proof of concept, but the footage eventually reached the U.S. through Zappa and a mutual friend. Not yet announced (and, notably, pre-“Obsession”), Hades Films was already looking for its first feature, and its founders happened to know Sánchez and Hale.

“Everyone went quiet when they said that they had a relationship with the creators of ‘The Blair Witch Project,’” Nybroe said of his first meeting with Hades. “They then asked me whether I would like to make the project in collaboration with Ed and Gregg. It is actually still a little difficult for me to believe. But it happened.”

Hertzberg and Zappa’s own creative collaboration has been gestating for considerably longer. The two met in kindergarten in Los Angeles and made their first horror film at age eight. Titled “Cataway,” it involved a giant stuffed cat, a jump rope, the top of a Sit ’n Spin, and an ill-fated stunt that broke Zappa’s nose.

Hertzberg later began his professional career pushing a mail cart at United Talent Agency in the mid-1990s. He went on to spend decades managing filmmakers and writers, working at Management 360 before founding the company that became Atlas Literary. Hades Films is now being spun out from that management and production venture.

Zappa (whose full name includes “Rodan,” after the “Godzilla” kaiju) grew up attending Fangoria conventions and working across nearly every sector of entertainment. He’s written books, developed animation, produced film and television, built an advertising agency, and helped musicians and their estates expand the reach of existing intellectual property.

That combined experience informs Hades Films’ goal of creating theatrical horror made for Gen Z — without treating younger audiences like a market segment that can be reverse-engineered. The company plans to produce original films and acquire outside projects, with an emphasis on transparency, creator participation, and stories capable of generating cultural conversation. (Another IndieWire exclusive, Hades Films recently partnered with James A. Janisse and Chelsea Rebecca’s on Fresh Meat, a short-film initiative designed to create a pathway into feature filmmaking for emerging horror directors.)

“We want to serve this generation of horror fans in a non-corporate, authentic way that’s able to earn their trust,” Hertzberg said. “We approach it as horror fans, and we want to be curatorial.”

Theatrical exhibition is a foundational part of that vision. For Zappa, watching his teenage daughter and her friends head out to watch horror movies together has reinforced his belief that the genre can still provide an experience that’s uniquely communal.

“The movie theater has always been a sacred place,” he said. “It’s like a form of going to church for me. It’s life-affirming when you see a really good genre movie. It’s a conversation piece.”

“The Influencer Project” gives Hades a particularly volatile conversation with which to announce itself. The title alone plays with a term that can, yes, describe a profession — but also diminish someone’s work and even invite audiences to see the human being onscreen as public property. King’s fictionalized self is exceptionally famous, but the danger this movie explores begins the moment the real woman starts posting.

“Whether they have 200 followers or 200,000, it only takes one person,” King said. “But more than anything, I want them to walk away feeling empowered rather than afraid.”

“The Influencer Project” opens in theaters internationally Friday, October 2. Watch the trailer above.