We’re in a pickle over Tickled. The Sundance audience favourite is making its way around cinemas—it’s playing at the Vancity Theatre as you read this—and leaving a commotion in its wake. But we can’t give too much away about the doc’s bizarre twists and turns, which all began innocuously enough when New Zealand TV journalist David Farrier stumbled onto the world of competitive endurance tickling; something that turned out to be anything but ‘innocuous’, at least as practiced by an American outfit called Jane O’Brien Media, purveyors of seemingly endless videos in which handsome young men are bound, straddled, and tickled by other, equally handsome young men.

Sensing a quirky human interest story, Farrier made contact with the company hoping for an interview. His inquiry was met with homophobic slurs, legal threats, and a visit to Auckland by three hostile Jane O’Brien representatives. Farrier and his directing partner Dylan Reeve greeted them at the airport with a camera and a preposterous welcome sign, and boom—suddenly the two filmmakers were in a world of shit.

Speaking to the Straight from Los Angeles, the amiable journalist has to choose his words carefully. His and Reeve’s investigation revealed a seemingly much more sinister operation behind the scenes; a true “tickling rabbit hole” as he puts it as Tickled evolves into a tale of immense individual wealth, too-weird-to-be-true monomania, and a vicious system of retribution. Perhaps a little predictably, the man identified in Tickled as the kingpin in this improbable scenario showed up at a screening in Los Angeles last month—much to the audience’s shock—to level more threats at the team.

“We’ve opened a can of worms now and I think we’re dealing with people who just don’t want to let it drop,” says the filmmaker. “There’s behaviour that’s been going on here for about 21 years now. The FBI got involved at one point, and that didn’t stop things from happening. I think that Dylan and I are seen as the main threat in this person’s life, so I don’t see it just stopping. But at the same time, we can go on with our lives and do other things. This is just a kind of background noise that’s going on at this stage; it’s just something we have to deal with as it happens.”

An online campaign to debunk the film is one of the major sources of the noise, including a website in which one participant recants everything he tells Farrier in the film. “I find that whole website pretty fascinating and I’d actively encourage anyone that’s seen the film to go look,” counters Farrier. “I think you can ascertain pretty quickly what’s going on there. I think it’s just another kind of insight into how these people operate.”

Farrier adds that he’s had to start a database after being contacted in the meantime by so many competitive endurance ticklers; or people who are perhaps more accurately described as naïve young men who made a quick buck making non-pornographic fetish videos. “Some are just curious about the film,” he says. “They say, ‘This sounds like something that happened to me 15 years ago, what’s it about?’ Some people have spoken about feeling some closure because it was just this strange thing that happened with no explanation.”

Others, meanwhile, come to Farrier claiming that they've been negatively impacted by their gig with Jane O’Brien. And that’s where things apparently get dicey. “We take them through what we learnt and some techniques to maybe help them,” says Farrier. “One of those tips is just ‘don’t engage,’ because the second that you fight back, then it’s game on. That’s where things really escalate.”

As for his own possibly reckless (and frequently amusing) tenacity, which involved the not unterrifying work of crashing a tickling shoot in LA, Farrier puts that down to a combination of curiosity and compassion. “I don’t think either Dylan or I could have died happy if we just let it go. It was just too interesting,” he says. “At the same time, we’d found these websites that were set up to shame these young men, and we were starting to talk to some of them, and a large portion of them did seem really scared and didn’t know what to do. It just seemed like this was a logical way to help out.”

He also learned that murky paraphilias and unhealthy power dynamics can find expression anywhere, even in the most innocent of activities. "Yeah," he says, a little sadly. “I’ve got four nieces and I don’t tickle them anymore."