When Barbie Ferreira was 12, she pierced her septum live on a website where “all the emo kids would go” – though she can’t remember the name. She also downloaded a video of Miley Cyrus and pretended to be her on Chatroulette. “I remember seeing something really crazy [on there]. I immediately ended the chat, but to this day, I have flashbacks,” she says. “I grew up on the internet, and I don’t even know what kind of damage it’s done to my brain – when you’re young and having fun, you’re not really understanding this open idea of the internet and then, boom, something can physically change your brain forever.”

When Ferreira read the script for Faces of Death – a modern reimagining of the 1978 horror classic – she immediately knew it was relevant to her own life. In the film, Ferreira plays Margot, a content moderator for a social media platform who stumbles upon a series of violent videos that appear to re-enact death scenes from the infamous film. After being told to leave the videos up, she decides to take matters into her own hands.

Ferreira believes she manifested her role in Faces of Death. She tells me she’s really good at making her dreams come true: as a teenager, she remembers posting “I want to be on an HBO show” on Tumblr (which, of course, happened with Euphoria). These days, she’ll do moon rituals and meditate with her friends. “I’m not a very woo-woo person; it’s more about intention and your brain and how powerful it can be,” she says. “I’m extremely clear. That is my strength. Since I was a little kid, I was like, ‘I know what I’m going to do’.”

Following her departure from Euphoria, Ferreira has thrown herself into the world of indie cinema, and now she’s finally playing the characters she’s always wanted to. She has just had two very different films come out: Faces of Death and Mile End Kicks, a Canadian rom-com where she plays a music critic who gets romantically involved with members of an indie band. She’s happy to be showcasing her versatility as an actor. “I want people to see these films before they cast me in something next, because I was on Euphoria seven years ago, and a lot of people just see me as a goth teenager,” she says. “I think it’s going to show a different side of me: an adult who has been doing this for a while and has found herself.” 

Ferreira is a natural in the horror genre, perhaps because she was always “very fascinated with death”. Not necessarily murder, but just the idea of the darkness of life. “I think I was just born emo and got angsty early, real early,” she says. “I had a not-so-great childhood, growing up very impoverished and always scared about immigration [Ferreira grew up in a Brazilian immigrant household], sharing an apartment with four people in two bedrooms in Queens.”

To escape in childhood, Ferreira says she became interested in culture that was “so outside” of her life: dark comedies like Harold and Maude and scary videos online. “For really sensitive, anxious people, a horror movie can feel like an escape to a different kind of anxiety,” she says. Her favourite horror movie list includes The Poughkeepsie Tapes, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Suspiria and Evil Dead. “What’s smart about horror is that a lot of messaging can come through without it knocking you over the head with the PSA of it all,” she says. “I love the original ones, where they’re basically made from cardboard, corn syrup and a dream.”

“In America, sex is so bad that it’s banned from almost all platforms, but seeing a country get bombed and families being killed and mutilated is totally OK”

While shooting Faces of Death, Ferreira watched found footage videos and The Silence of the Lambs, and listened to the true crime podcast Hunting Warhead. She was in New Orleans, which she describes as a “very witchy city”, and would spend her days off at the Museum of Death or Museum of Voodoo. “The house that I was living in was haunted, and I’ve never had a haunting in my life,” she says. “In the middle of the night, in the laundry room, a really heavy [object] flew off the shelf.” It was Ferreira’s first time playing the main character, and she learned to treat shooting days as a marathon, not a sprint. She couldn’t even speak to her co-star Dacre Montgomery, because they wanted their fight scenes to have real tension.

After filming wrapped up, Ferreira watched a lot of SpongeBob and That’s So Raven. “I did that for about four weeks,” she says. “Then I was diving into a PG movie about daddy issues, which is another horror for me.” She had to retrain her brain (and her algorithm) away from watching horrible videos online, which she did while shooting to maintain a sense of “numbness”.

Recently, according to Ferreira, Faces of Death has only become more relevant (there is a growing awareness of the psychological harm routinely inflicted on the people tasked with scouring videos for violent and harmful content). “Content moderation is not really about protecting people at all; it’s about making sure that [companies] are not liable for things,” she says. “In America, sex is so bad that it’s banned from almost all platforms, but seeing a country get bombed and families being killed and mutilated is totally OK.” She admits she’s worried about her grandma being a victim of a romance scam. And her mum being reeled in by AI slop. And the younger generation in general. “I used to feel like I was in a secret club, but now everyone’s in the secret club of the internet, and it’s not something that you can choose to see or not. It will just be in your algorithm,” Ferreira says. 

Margot is exactly the kind of character that Ferreira wants to keep playing, because she wants to embody people who have grit. “I don’t always like being the person in a full face of makeup, waking up from a slumber with my hair perfectly curled,” she says. “There’s a time and place for that, but at this moment in my career, I’ve been having fun playing these messy characters who are and look real.” What that looks like next is something she’s still figuring out. She even mentioned doing a “ye olde” period piece. “I just hope I don’t have Instagram face,” she says, laughing.