by In a year overflowing with horror releases, Red Rooms was named the most disturbing film of 2024, according to SlashFilm and other genre critics. Director Pascal Plante’s chilly psychological thriller earned notoriety not just for its grim subject matter, but for its unsettling realism. The story follows Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy), a French-Canadian fashion model whose obsession with a serial killer draws her deeper into the digital abyss. Critics praised Gariépy’s performance as “shockingly good,” portraying a woman whose emotional vacancy mirrors the cold world she inhabits.
But Red Rooms doesn’t rely on supernatural horror. Instead, it anchors its terror in the everyday darkness of the internet: livestreamed torture rooms, cryptocurrency-funded murders, and poker games with life-altering stakes. Online poker and Bitcoin are central to the plot, thematically echoing Kelly-Anne’s emotional detachment and moral ambiguity. When she’s not sleeping on the courthouse steps to follow the trial of “The Demon of Rosemont,” she’s crushing anonymous opponents in high-stakes poker tournaments: coldly calculating, ruthlessly focused. And when she needs to purchase a murder video on the dark web? She turns to her crypto-funded poker winnings. Let’s take a closer look at how online poker and cryptocurrency weren’t just window dressing in Red Rooms, but key forces driving its horror forward.
Playing to Kill: Online Poker as Power, Psychology, and Plot
In Red Rooms, online poker is the financial engine behind Kelly-Anne’s descent and a chilling metaphor for her psychological state. The Guardian describes her as having “a serial-killer’s pleasure at crushing her opponents,” while The Hollywood Reporter notes that her emotionless nature makes her a “consistent winner” in the game. As the story unfolds, we learn that her online poker success, bolstered by cryptocurrency transactions, gives her the funds to buy a copy of the murder tape, evidence that would ultimately unravel the case against accused killer Ludovic Chevalier. This twist blurs the line between Kelly-Anne as voyeur and vigilante.
In the real world, huge winnings for this kind of high-stakes online poker aren’t far-fetched. Americas Cardroom has built a reputation for hosting massive tournaments with life-changing payouts. Their recent Dual Venom event offered over $10 million guaranteed, with individual bounties reaching up to $500,000. And, just like in Red Rooms, players can deposit and withdraw funds using Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies on the Americas Cardroom site. This connection between online poker and crypto makes the movie’s premise hauntingly plausible. Americas Cardroom also makes it easy for anyone to enter high-roller territory. Whether through No-Limit Hold’em or Pot-Limit Omaha, bounty hunters can win five- or six-figure prizes simply by eliminating other players. The cold precision Kelly-Anne exhibits at the poker table mirrors her approach to life: detached, strategic, and willing to go all-in for information no one should possess.
Crypto and the Dark Web: Fuel for Modern Horror
If poker is Kelly-Anne’s weapon, then cryptocurrency is the means to her madness. Bitcoin plays a dual role in Red Rooms, powering both the purchase of the snuff video and the fictional “red room” itself, an urban myth of livestreamed murders on the dark web, available for crypto payment. As one reviewer from The Daily Iowan notes, Kelly-Anne sells off her crypto to acquire the gruesome tape, which she later uses to implicate the killer by placing it on the mother’s nightstand of one of the victims. The horror of Red Rooms lies not in the violence, but in how disturbingly normal it all seems. Tor browsers, private cryptocurrency wallets, and P2P file sharing aren’t elements of a sci-fi fantasy; they’re tools you could use today. The implication? Horror isn’t lurking behind some haunted house. It’s a few keystrokes away.
This trend of using cryptocurrency to fuel horror is not unique to Red Rooms. Other films and stories have explored similar digital darkness. The Litecoin Foundation famously helped produce We Summon the Darkness, adding real-world crypto credibility to horror filmmaking. Meanwhile, in the indie novella Omniviolence, a killer uses a drone and a computer to livestream murders in exchange for crypto, reflecting the commodification of violence that Red Rooms critiques. Even scenes that delve into the technical aspects, like a witness explaining how Tor browsing works, add a chilling layer of realism to Red Rooms. The film is a commentary on how the internet enables previously inaccessible violence, now sanitized and sensationalized through both mainstream and fringe media.
Digital Horror Hits Close to Home
In Red Rooms, horror doesn’t spring from ghosts or curses. It comes from the screen in your pocket. It’s through this precise use of modern technology, the tools we trust and use daily, that makes Red Rooms feel less like a movie and more like a warning. The film is a mirror, reflecting our desensitization, our digital obsession, and the terrifying ease with which anonymity and ambition can coalesce into something monstrous.
