Horror movies have always reflected the social climate of their times. From post-WWI trauma in the ’20s to feminism and bodily autonomy in the ’70s to 9/11 anxieties in the early aughts, even if the films weren’t overtly political, they reflected real-life jitters.
Today, as social media continues to splinter relationships and spread fake news, content moderators — the poor souls doomed to monitor posts all day to determine if they are “dangerous” — are popping up as characters in scary movies. Just this spring, three new films center on online moderators, and while all are frightening, the stories spin in different directions.
At SXSW, Matt Black and Ryan Polly debuted “Monitor,” in which a demon is triggered by a blocked video. Also at the fest, Ed Dougherty and Brea Grant screened the comedic anthology “Grind,” which features a key segment in which a moderator’s purgatorial existence drives him mad.
Meanwhile, Daniel Goldhaber’s reimagining of notorious cult film “Faces of Death,” which he scripted with Isa Mazzei, is headed to theaters on April 10 and features a meta-narrative also set in the world of content moderation — a job Goldhaber once held for a summer.
These entries all come in the wake of Uta Briesewitz’s similarly themed “American Sweatshop,” which debuted at last year’s SXSW and saw a recent surge of interest after being added to Hulu.
Dougherty sees the job as a metaphor for what modern society experiences daily online.
“It’s balancing everyday work with the horrors that are happening around us,” he says.
Content moderation is a position that carries an outsize level of hazard. A November 2025 study from the University of Washington measured the effects of the job on workers against their mental health, and the results were dire. Moderators felt “negative automatic thoughts, ongoing stress and avoidant coping, as well as consistently predicted higher PTSD and depression” compared with other professionals. Companies often invest in specialized psychiatric services to help offset these impacts.
Additionally, both Elon Musk at X and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Instagram have made moves to reduce human moderation, saying the work could be AI-driven while also devaluing a position they feel overly polices free speech. But the clear downside is that more people are susceptible to seeing real violence, sex or other inappropriate content in their day-to-day lives, and are forced to filter it themselves.
In a meta twist, “Faces of Death” stars Barbie Ferreira as the lead content moderator. Ferreira gained fame as a teen model and broke out as a cast member on the graphic HBO series “Euphoria.”
“Barbie has been extremely online since she was young and has a lot of her own experiences with the horror of it,” Goldhaber says.
Also playing a moderator alongside Ferreira? Charli xcx, whose music and persona have been sources of constant online dissection for years.
Despite exorcising his digital anxieties in “Grind,” Dougherty doesn’t think the malignant corners of the internet will be managed anytime soon.
“I’m a very dark person, but I’m weirdly an optimist,” he says. “But in this regard, everything I thought was going to get worse has only gotten worse.”