With friends like these...
RACHAEL DAVIS chats to the writers and stars of All My Friends Hate Me about social paranoia, class guilt and flipping the genres of comedy and horror
THANKS to social media, a permanently connected society and the pace of modern life, social anxiety has become increasingly common.
It’s hard for young people to imagine a life before smartphones, when you didn’t spend hours tapping through highlight reels of other people’s lives or anxiously awaiting a text after a night out that proves your friends don’t all hate you.
This collective sense of social dread among millennials is what inspired British comedy duo Tom Stourton and Tom Palmer’s comichorror film All My Friends Hate Me, helmed by Stath Lets Flats director Andrew Gaynord.
In the film’s opening minutes Pete, played by Siblings star Tom Stourton, arrives at a huge manor house on the invitation of his uni friends for his 31st birthday weekend.
No one is there, and he sits and waits for hours until his friends reappear from an afternoon at the pub. They inform him that he was only invited as a joke – they didn’t actually expect him to turn up.
It’s quickly revealed that they were only joking – of course the party’s for him – but judging by the look on Pete’s face, it does nothing to reassure his anxious mind.
The weekend’s atmosphere goes from strained to bizarre to downright alarming thanks, in part, to his friends inviting Harry, a feral stranger they met at the local pub.
Is Pete part of some sick joke? Is there something more nefarious going on? Or is he being paranoid?
The concept behind All My Friends Hate Me is loosely based on a personal experience Stourton had, when he was invited to a wedding by some uni friends who he hadn’t seen for a while.
“I was a bit surprised to be invited,” he continues, “and I went out the night before which was a huge mistake.
“I was feeling very fragile, and got it in my head that I’d been invited to this wedding as a joke. During the speeches, I was convinced the groom was going to announce this joke and make fun of me.
“I told Tom this, and he was like: ‘Wow, you are an incredibly selfcentred man to make someone else’s wedding about you’. But we thought it was kind of a cool set-up, maybe, this idea of someone going to an event that there’s this pressure to have fun, but in his head he’s crumbling. That felt relatable, potentially.”
Social anxiety is nothing new, but feels far more prevalent now as social media has become a vessel through which we show off our lives.
“We had a backstory that Pete has been away from his friends, presenting his life to them for the last five years through his Facebook or whatever, and that probably has set him up for this very anxious weekend because he’s really trying to remind them of who he is,” Tom Palmer explains.
“Social media has changed a lot about the way we live: there are just a lot more eyes watching us at any one time.”
Looming with the theme of social anxiety in All My Friends Hate Me is the shadow of class guilt, which both adds to Pete’s anxiety and is caused by it.
Setting off to the gigantic manor house estate owned by his friend, Pete insists that his friends are “really not stereotypical posh people” – but the generational wealth is impossible to ignore.
Pete struggles with his inner conflict, feeling guilt about his debauched past while trying to prove himself as a thoughtful, conscientious new man who helps refugees, but his friends and their obnoxious jokes make him squirm partly because he can see himself in them.
“It felt like such a good added element to Pete, that he was so worried about being posh just added to his overall anxiety,” says Stourton.
“It feels pressing, in a time when we’re assessing ourselves a bit more in that way. Hopefully it adds a bit of pressure to the story.”
This pressure is something that builds continuously throughout the film. Though it is a dark comedy, Palmer and Stourton employed tropes from the horror genre to build tension between the comic relief.
Palmer explains that the horror element of the film was about “taking trivial moments and raising them with the stakes of horror films”.
He references a scene where Pete is standing at a mirror, trying to decide whether to do up his top button or not, which is soundtracked by a “proper horror score” to show viewers the horror film that is playing out inside the character’s head.
“I think really good horror films leave you with a feeling, it sort of clings to you,” adds Stourton.
“When we were writing it, we were always chasing that feeling of anxiety, that was an anchor for each scene.”
All My Friends Hate Me is set almost exclusively in a huge, isolated house – Sidbury Manor in Devon.
The cast and crew lived in the property for three weeks during production which helped them get into the mindset of their characters.
“There’s a big, sort of epic scene at the end where everything unravels, it’s all in one room and there are eight characters, and we knew it would be pretty much two or three days shooting in this one room,” says Palmer.
“The director really wanted that to take place at the end of the shoot, so that we would have that sense of everyone being quite tired, a bit exhausted, maybe they were going a little bit mad being trapped in this room.
“I think stuff like that definitely really shines through in the final film.”
Despite the touches of horror, the film retains its “traditionally British or Richard Curtis-y” set-up, as Stourton describes it, which takes the archetype of the awkward Brit and flips it on its head: instead of being charming in his awkwardness, he’s having a “really terrible time”.
“We thought about broad comedies like Meet The Parents and thought: well, what if that was actually happening for real? That would be a really horrific weekend!” says Palmer.
“We were almost taking those comedy tropes and turning them into horror, as well as vice versa.”
Social media has changed a lot about the way we live: there are just a lot more eyes watching us...
Tom Palmer
All My Friends Hate Me is in cinemas now