The viral horror short Siren Head is now becoming a Warner Bros movie, with Brian Duffield and Zach Cregger behind it. Backrooms and Obsession have sent Hollywood into a hunting frenzy. With both films being directed by young YouTube creators, studios are now looking around for other viral videos they can use as fodder for ... Siren Head | Zach Cregger and Brian Duffield to adapt viral online horror short
The viral horror short Siren Head is now becoming a Warner Bros movie, with Brian Duffield and Zach Cregger behind it.
Backrooms and Obsession have sent Hollywood into a hunting frenzy. With both films being directed by young YouTube creators, studios are now looking around for other viral videos they can use as fodder for hit movies.
Another candidate has already been found: Siren Head, a creature and accompanying set of viral videos created by artist and designer Trevor Henderson in 2018. It’s now going to be a horror feature at Warner Bros.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, the whole deal came together within a matter of days. Weapons director Zach Cregger and Brian Duffield, who made No One Will Save You and is behind the forthcoming Whalefall, are co-writing the script together; Duffield is expected to direct.
The combination of two much talked-about filmmakers and viral short are said to have triggered a bidding war among major Hollywood studios, including Sony, Universal, Paramount and 20th Century Studios; Warner Bros won, and is said to have paid “low seven figures” for the package of property and filmmakers. It’ll be produced via its new Warner Brothers Clockwork wing.
Originally created in 2018, the Siren Head is pretty much what it sounds like: a gigantic, low-BMI creature with a pair of sirens where its head should be. Videos featuring the crypto – some made by its creator, many not – have racked up millions of not billions of views across various social media platforms.
Just about all of them see the critter stomping ominously around various landscapes while people flee in terror. Given the low-budget nature of these videos, the visual effects in the best of them are pretty terrific.
Film studios have tried to turn memes and viral sensations into movies before 2026, but the results have sometimes been grim. Slender Man, released in 2018, was based on a creepypasta meme that started doing the rounds in the late 2000s. The resulting film, directed by Sylvain White, was critically panned; that the online legend had connections to a tragic real-life murder case also gave it a general aura of tawdriness.
Backrooms, on the other hand, has been little short of a triumph – perhaps because its producers were smart enough to get in the young filmmaker behind its videos and give him the creative space to turn it into an unusually unhurried feature full of creeping dread. Backrooms isn’t gross or frightening, but it’s definitely eerie – something we haven’t seen all that often in the more recent crop of horror movies.
Duffield and Cregger are said to have signed on for Siren Head after coming up with a way of adapting it that excited them. Whatever they have in mind, the project has certainly caught the interest of Hollywood studio execs.
We’ll bring you more on Siren Head as we hear it.
