All My Friends Hate Me is A Social Anxiety Horror Story

As a person with an anxiety disorder, let me tell you: there is nothing scarier than a social situation.

Well, maybe a few things – using the wrong colour of toothbrush, for one – but the fraught discomfort of navigating the complicated landscape that comes with the needs, wants, and expectations of a group of people is a fucking bloodbath for the anxiety-ridden amongst us.

Which makes it rich territory for the horror genre. As we’ve covered before here on No But Listen, the horror genre has a speckled history with mental illness, but, done right, it can form the centrepiece of some of the most effective horror in recent memory.

Which is where All My Friends Hate Me comes in. Directed by Andrew Gaynord, 2021’s horror-comedy All My Friends Hates Me follows Pete (co-writer and star Tom Stourton) as he meets up with his old university friends for his 31st birthday after spending the preceding year volunteering at a refugee camp, and his uneasy attempts to re-integrate into a friend group that once felt like home.

The difficult part about adapting anxiety into film is how internal anxiety is. Yes, it really can feel like living in the midst of the most head-twisting horror you’ve ever imagined, but, from the outside in, it often looks like nothing is actually going on. Gaynord does a fantastic job finding the cinematic language to communicate what it feels like to live in that grip of self-inflicted terror, those woozy camera angles and lingering shots inviting us to overthink just like Pete does. I haven’t seen many movies that really capture the feeling of the anxiety closing in around you like this one does, and it’s a credit to both the script and especially Stourton’s performance that it feels so discomfortingly real. The blend of horror and comedy is a perfect genre-blend, the absurdity and the nightmarishness of the anxiety in equal parts.

But it’s also a movie about the distance that grows between people as they grow older – Pete is as much trying to navigate what was once his normal as he is trying to survive the perceived terror he’s under, and it’s this grounding in reality that makes it such an impactful movie. As a movie about millenials, and as a millenial myself, All My Friends Hate Me depicts the strange place our generation is headed to – where the usual distance that exists between old friends is still present, but the presence of social media and other technology has created an artificial bridge over that distance, a closeness and an alienation all at once. I love the way this movie explores this idea, melancholy but not unaware of the bizarre and often cringe-worthy dynamics of thirty-somethings trying to reclaim their coke-drenched glory days.

Blending horror, comedy, social commentary, and sheer, brutal anxiety, All My Friends Hate Me is one of the most memorable and discomforting movies I’ve seen in a long time. If you can grit your teeth through the panic attacks, trust me – it’s worth it.

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By Lou MacGregor