Harry Stainer
Harry Stainer is the Social Media Editor at Empire, having worked in the field for five years before joining the Empire team in 2024. His special interests are Korean cinema (rumour has it if you mention Bong Joon Ho’s name in a conversation, Harry will simply appear), the full spectrum of horror — from Jack Clayton’s haunting The Innocents, to the B-movie chaos of Frank Henenlotter, to A24’s more recent “elevated horror". Harry loves it all — and firmly believes Midsommar is the greatest break-up movie ever made. Of course, his biggest obsession of all is The Last Of Us — both the TV show and the games — and his pride and joy is beating both games on Grounded. Don’t get him started on why Joel was right.
Read moreFrom Instagram to Twitter (ahem, X, sorry), Harry keeps Empire’s social media Tik(tok)ing along — sharing news, features, and creating videos for all things Empire. He curates social-first lists like the Empire Oscars — featuring the coveted “Glen Powell Of The Year” award (you’ll never guess the winner) — holding the Empire team at gunpoint to get them to discuss all their film-related hot takes. Harry also dips his toes into interviewing folks for the magazine, as well as for the Pilot TV and Empire Podcasts.
Before joining Team Empire, Harry could be found in the games industry, working with the likes of Rockstar Games and Sumo Digital. He then became an in-house Social Media Manager for Merlin Entertainments, heading up the social channels (and going very viral) for The London Dungeon and SEA LIFE London Aquarium. Harry spent his time at university studying film and screenwriting while running personal film blogs and co-managing the socials for the student cinema — where he regularly forced crowds to watch his favourite so-bad-they’re-good movies.
Harry’s love of film started with movie nights at school, where he and a group of friends would stay up all night, marathoning the video nasties, watching all the Alien films (yes, even the bad ones), and struggling to sleep after watching John Carpenter’s The Thing for the first time. Since then, he has fallen in love with cinema, with the films of David Fincher, Lynne Ramsay, and Park Chan-wook among his favourites. Plus, if a film has a certain amount of yearning — looking at you, Aftersun and Past Lives — he’s guaranteed to love it
Harry's favourite films are Blade Runner and Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind; he will die on the hill that Nope is Jordan Peele’s best film; he can’t watch Uncut Gems again because it gave him too much anxiety; and he is STILL angry that Challengers didn’t get a score or screenplay nod at the Oscars.
