Obsession is territory David Farrier knows well, and a subject he can’t seem to avoid.
For more than a decade, he’s been digging into the darkest corners of the internet, unraveling twisted threads— and twisted psyches— often at the risk of his own mental and physical well-being.
Through his documentaries Tickled, Mister Organ and Netflix series Dark Tourist, his podcast Flightless Bird and newsletter Webworm, Farrier has tackled everything from the dark underbelly of competitive endurance tickling to abuse in Megachurches, the QAnon conspiracy theories of previously-beloved lingerie brand Lonely to Melbourne’s Fake Seizure Guy (more on that later).
It’s a job that requires a certain level of obsession on Farrier’s part — you don’t throw yourself down internet rabbit holes or into the path of a litigation-happy sociopathic narcissist unless you’re strongly compelled to do so.
But the end result wouldn’t be half as interesting if his subjects weren’t themselves a bit obsessive. As David said to me:
“I get obsessive about people who are obsessive… So who's the sicko, right?”
For this instalment of Obsessions, David Farrier dives into the pros and pitfalls of his work, reveals a surprising early obsession, and uncovers how he manages to stay sane in an increasingly deranged world.
Early obsessions
While “obsessive” might not be the first word David uses to describe himself, he has to admit it’s fitting. “If I get into something, I really get into it. Whether it’s a hobby or a story or a band,” he explains.
He’s always been like this. As a kid, David’s parents patiently endured his lizard phase (and the terrariums of skinks crowding the house), as well as his X-Files fixation, from which he still has an extensive collection of trading cards.
These and other obsessions were eventually packed away in boxes, where they remained for years, cluttering understair and attic spaces, his parents dutifully lugging them about whenever they relocated (he’s since moved them to a storage unit - because he’s a grown up, god damn it).
Of course, everyone was obsessed with The X Files in the 90s. I mean:
… And it’s not unusual for children to get engrossed by weird animals, either. But young David also had a tendency to take an interest in things his peers overlooked.
In the northland city of Whangārei (where he lived til he was 10) when all the other kids were climbing trees and building tree houses, David had his sights set on terra firma.
“Something in my brain went ‘it's way cooler to be underground than up in a tree’
And so —this sounds psychotic— but I got really obsessed with the idea of tunnelling, and I started digging tunnels in the backyard.
I was like a little mole.”
Ever supportive of his son’s fixations, David’s dad jumped in to help on the tunnel project. Together, they excavated a passage under the family driveway which was fortified with wood and big enough to fit the both of them.
It’s a better anecdote than I could have hoped for - that someone who would later become known for journalistic ‘digging’ began with an actual spade in hand (it’s also very worm-like, though not where his newsletter’s name Webworm came from).
And David’s tunnelling impulses remain alive, if unpracticed, today. When a US TikToker named Kala went viral for burrowing tunnels under her Virginia home, David began to feel the pull to dig resurfacing.
“It's lucky I'm in an apartment now because there are no tunnelling opportunities.
But If I ever have a house or own a backyard, watch out,” he laughs.
Early days
David Farrier kicked off his journalism career at TV3, New Zealand's first privately owned television channel, where he worked as the entertainment reporter for late night show Nightline from 2006.
Here, Farrier began to build a name for himself with celebrity and pop culture reports that grew increasingly offbeat (read: unhinged) as time went on. You can see the evolution unfolding in this farewell video made for David by his Nightline co-workers in 2009, after his final appearance on the show (where he also reads the weather aloud to music from Slayer, as per his final request before signing off 😂)
Although entertainment reporting offered limited opportunities for in-depth, investigative work, there are early signs that David would head in this direction.
In 2013, when Australian soap Home & Away mysteriously disappeared from the network’s airwaves, David took it upon himself to figure out what was going on.
“I got a camera and went up to level 4 and knocked on the programmers door… like: ‘I'm from the news, what's happened to Home & Away?'“
I just remember how pissy they looked,” he says.
What David saw as a joke was - to the programmers - serious business. The person in charge of renegotiating the deal with Home & Away had messed up, and the show had been poached by rival network TVNZ.
“That completely tanked the news on TV3 for some time,” says David.
Down the rabbit hole
In 2014, a friend of David’s sent him a link to a website for the company Jane O’Brien Media. On their Facebook page, he found endless pictures of good looking young men in tight uniforms … tickling each other.
The site was looking for recruits, and offering generous compensation for anyone willing to fly to Los Angeles and get tickling. David posted on the page, requesting an interview.
Then came the reply: "Association with a homosexual journalist is not something that we will embrace.”
His curiosity now well and truly piqued, David continued to blog about the company, soon after receiving a letter from a New York attorney asking him to stop poking around in Jane O’Brien Media business - or else.
“When you’re getting legal threats from a competitive tickling group, you know something’s up,” he says.
It’s a good tip for anyone wanting to bury something dodgy: reply less defensively to media enquiries. Even better, David advises, don’t reply at all! “If you want a journalist to take notice of you, hire a lawyer.”
The legal letter was the ‘lightning bolt’ moment that ultimately pushed David into the world of investigative journalism.
“I realised … maybe I'm not just a light news guy. Maybe I can also do other things,” he says.
Ctrl+Alt+Expose
Investigative journalism is not a career to be stepped into lightly.
Most investigative journalists undergo years of training in media ethics and law, court and police processes, and the art of meticulous research and fact checking. While David had worked as a journalist for some time, undergoing an actual investigation - especially one involving trigger happy American lawyers - was a big risk.
“It was super new to me… The only experience I'd had myself was in watching other journalists do that work,” he says.
During his time at TV3, the current affairs show 60 Minutes had been produced in the same building. On slow days, when David grew bored of his entertainment rounds, he’d often find himself sitting in on 60 Minutes edits. “I think that was really important… just seeing how some of those longer stories were constructed,” he says.
Around the time the Tickled story came into his orbit, David was fortunate to cross paths with another investigative "newbie" Dylan Reeve, who — turns out — was also curious about the competitive endurance tickling story. The pair eventually launched a Kickstarter campaign, raising nearly $30,000 to get started on the project. Then, together with some keen friends and a couple of savvy media lawyers who agreed to work pro bono to deal with the legal threats hounding the team, production for Tickled went ahead.
“I could not have even begun to have done [that project] without those people,” says David.
Eighteen months later, Tickled was released to critical acclaim.
The documentary received praise from critics at The Guardian (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️), The New York Times (“Mr Farrier… is less of a showboat than some documentarians” 😂) and several publications here at home (RNZ called it “a marvel”).
To date, Tickled maintains a 94% rating on review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, and has been mentioned in a bunch of other pop culture mediums, including the Cruel Intentions TV remake and this anthology of female horror writers.
Something both critics and fans have praised about Tickled is the way it uses a seemingly-silly hook as the launching point for a more serious —and inevitably darker— investigation (which I won’t spoil here).
It’s the same tack David would take with his second documentary feature Mister Organ, which begins with an innocent-enough premise, looking into the man behind a spate of car clamping dramas outside an Auckland antique store, but quickly spirals down a very strange rabbit hole, exposing a larger trail of destruction left by that man over a period of 20 years.
“[Mister Organ] is the one I look back on and wonder… If I had my time again whether I would do it,” David says
“Michael Organ is someone who just sort of breaks people… And he kind of did that to me in various ways.”
It’s a big part of what makes the film so compelling: watching in real time as Farrier gets pulled into the orbit of a human ‘black hole’—someone just as obsessed with him as he is with them.
Without this dynamic, it’s hard to know if the film would have worked. Michael Organ is at times a fascinating character, but he’s also so fucking dull. As David bemoans in the doco:
“I have met the most boring man on planet Earth, and he is my essential character.”
Watching Mister Organ as a journalist is especially stressful — you know that every 5 minute long, monotonous diatribe is just a fraction of the hours-long rants Farrier and his team had to endure to shape the final edit.
Now, obviously David chose to put himself in this position.
This was the documentary he set out to make, and Michael Organ was his chosen subject.
He couldn’t have predicted where it would lead — Organ somehow getting a key to his house, taking him to court over an abandoned business sign, turning up to various screenings of the film and talking loudly throughout, and later dragging him back to court for hearings he had nothing to do with.
But he knew he was pursuing an unstable and antisocial personality. It was probably never going to end well.
In his excellent review of Mister Organ for Flicks, Tim Batt said: “At this point, you have to wonder if… something inside [Farrier] is self-generating a gravitational pull that invites villains and sociopaths to enter his orbit.”
I put this comment to David in our interview.
“I mean, there'd be a read of my work that says that I'm obsessive, so I'm just chasing other obsessive people because I see myself reflected in them in some way,” he says.
Which begs the question: Is Farrier as bad as Michael Organ, for obsessively looking into him for six years of his life?
He pauses, then says, “I don't think so, because… my work is doing a public service.”
With both Tickled and Mister Organ, the entertaining hook belies much more serious undercurrents —where real people are harmed, exploited, and manipulated. As a person who is justice-sensitive (a trait which might be tied to Farrier’s ADHD diagnosis, though he hasn’t fully embraced it yet), David may well wish he'd never crossed paths with Michael Organ. But once he did, walking away simply wasn’t an option.
“If I see something that's wrong, I want to fix it…. And the toolset I have is journalism,” he says.
By All Means & Mediums
One of the most thrilling aspects of Farrier’s work is how seamlessly he wields his journalistic toolset across a variety of mediums - from newsletter to podcast to video documentary.
It was through his newsletter Webworm that readers were first introduced to “Fake Seizure Guy” (I’ll call him FSG for brevity), a Melbourne individual who tricks people into sitting on him by claiming to have a seizure (side note: you should never sit on someone who’s having a seizure)… and who’s been doing this without repercussion for years, despite multiple complaints to local police.
Farrier followed up the story through his podcast Flightless Bird, travelling to Melbourne to interview witnesses to and victims of the behaviour. While no-one knows exactly what FSG is up to — Is it some kind of kink? Is he autistic, as an apparent friend of his claimed in an email to Farrier, and this behaviour a type of stimming?— the truth remains that FSG is misleading members of the public, and leaving many of them feeling violated and taken advantage of.
In February this year, Fake Seizure Guy was arrested and charged by Victoria Police, thanks in large part to Farrier’s reporting.
“Hopefully the person gets the help they need.
Because you get the wrong person to sit on you… it's not going to end well,” says David.
Another riveting aspect of Farrier’s work is watching bigger, better resourced organisations sometimes trail in his wake, building on a story first broken on Webworm —and often refusing to mention it.
This has been most obvious with Farrier’s extensive coverage of abuse, racism, sexual assault, homophobia, bullying and more, within Aotearoa’s biggest Pentecostal megachurches, Life, City Impact, and Arise (you can find all his Megachurch reporting filed in one place, here).
Only after Farrier’s findings went public did mainstream news outlets begin to pick up the story, and most of the time they failed to credit his work as an original source. This isn’t just disingenuous, Farrier believes, but actually misleading.
"Reading their stories, you'd think the churches had magically just decided to launch this investigation into themselves.
No - that was because of Webworm's reporting. In leaving out that, readers missed that context entirely,” he says.
Holding Light in the Dark
Farrier’s work often takes him deep into the shadows, where he investigates the worst of human nature, peeling back layers of deception and power. Sometimes, his investigations put him directly in the crosshairs of dangerous individuals.
It makes me wonder: Does this work shape his view of humanity for the worse?
“Some days I feel a lot of hope and I think we're only hearing from the worst people because the worst people tend to be the loudest. But it’s hard,” he admits.
Even well-meaning people can be maddening, when they fail to confront the issues he uncovers. For example, every Megachurch exposé published on Webworm is met with a familiar refrain—offended Christians insisting, "That’s not us." Farrier, who grew up within Christianity, knows there are good churches and good people of faith. But instead of telling him, he wishes they’d speak up where it truly matters.
“I wish people were louder about calling the bad shit out. Sometimes I feel like a bit alone in that,” he says.
Obsessive characters also have a tendency to stick. In 2021, Farrier moved from Auckland to Los Angeles, a city that keeps him close to the action, career-wise. But the move wasn’t just about opportunity; it was also a way to escape Michael Organ, who still lurked on the edges of his life.
“He doesn't have a passport. He's stuck in New Zealand. He can't come over here. And I'm incredibly grateful for that,” says Farrier.
Like most people trying to stay grounded in an increasingly deranged time, Farrier has strategies to employ whenever things get too much: catching up with friends, spending time with animals, going on “hikes” (actually they’re just walks, but that’s what his LA friends call them).
And his audience would be happy to know that they help him a lot, too.
“The unexpected best thing about the newsletter I write is that… the comment section is one of the purist, most insightful comment sections on the internet.
It's so nice. There's people there that are like 16 and there's people there that are 82…. From Japan and the UK and Australia and Iceland.
And that's a reminder, like, things are okay.
People are okay.”
Thanks so much for your time & your epic mahi David Farrier 💗
Very self involved (and obsessed) of me to leave a comment here, but wanted to say how much I enjoyed the process of doing this with you. And the final result. You really take care with your work, and get into things in a really interesting way. Thank you!