In 2018, Trevor Henderson drew a skeletal predator with two sirens fused where a head should be and posted it online, mostly for fun. This week, that drawing beat out Sony, Universal, Paramount and Disney’s 20th Century Studios in a bidding war, landing instead at Warner Bros.
Warner Bros. won the rights to “Siren Head” in a five-studio auction, according to The Hollywood Reporter’s account of the deal, with the rights package alone valued in the low seven figures and the full commitment described as a massive, multi-million-dollar undertaking. The studio’s offer came with one non-negotiable term: the film has to open in theaters. Streaming was explicitly off the table.
Brian Duffield, whose survival film “Whalefall” has been generating industry buzz ahead of its own release, will direct and co-write the script with Zach Cregger, the filmmaker behind this year’s “Weapons.” Cregger produces alongside Roy Lee and Andrew Childs of Vertigo Entertainment, Scott Glassgold of 12:01 Films, and Duffield through his own Jurassic Party Productions, a producer list crowded enough to suggest how many parties wanted a piece of this before a single page of script existed.
What five studios were actually bidding on is a character with no story yet, only a mythology built by an internet audience that got there first. Henderson’s creature, described as lurking in rural, wooded areas and blaring recorded sounds to draw in prey, has since accumulated roughly 3 billion TikTok views, 1 billion YouTube views and millions of plays inside Roblox, the kind of reach a studio marketing department cannot manufacture no matter the budget.
That math is exactly why Hollywood is circling internet-native horror right now. A24’s adaptation of Kane Parsons’ YouTube horror hit “The Backrooms” quietly outperformed its own summer competition just weeks ago, proving an audience raised on creepypasta and viral cryptids will pay for a ticket. Warner Bros. is betting Henderson’s creature can repeat that trick, and the studio’s insistence on a theatrical release rather than a streaming date reads as a direct wager that this built-in fandom will show up in person.
Henderson is not new to this kind of deal, and his track record carries its own warning label. He designed the eight monsters for Sony’s 2024 film “Tarot,” built with producer Scott Glassgold, the same producer now attached to “Siren Head.” “Tarot” opened on an $8 million budget and went on to gross roughly $49 million worldwide, a genuinely profitable outcome for Sony, but it did so while critics rated it in the high teens on Rotten Tomatoes. The lesson studios appear to have taken from that film is not that internet-creature horror makes good movies. It is that internet-creature horror makes money regardless of whether it makes good movies, and that distinction is doing a lot of quiet work in this new deal.
No release date has been set, and neither Warner Bros. nor the creative team has said what the film’s actual plot will be, only that it exists somewhere inside Henderson’s sprawling, fan-expanded mythology. Whether Cregger and Duffield, both credited with sharper writing instincts than the genre’s cash-grab reputation usually allows, can turn a viral drawing into something more than “Tarot” with a taller monster is the open question a bidding war this size does not answer by itself.
For now, the only confirmed fact is the one that got five studios into a room: an artist’s drawing from 2018 is worth more to Hollywood today than most original scripts ever pitched to it.
