Warner Bros. has snapped up Siren Head, a characteristic bundle primarily based on the viral horror meme from Trevor Henderson, which has Brian Duffield set to direct from a script co-written with Zach Cregger, Deadline can verify.
Sources mentioned the challenge, primarily based an authentic take by Cregger, landed on the studio following a five-way bidding warfare. Cregger and Duffield will produce alongside Roy Lee, Andrew Childs, and Scott Glassgold, with rights holder Henderson exec producing.
Siren Head is the type of youth-oriented, internet-rooted horror IP that studios are chasing urgently following A24’s success with Backrooms, the breakout horror movie tailored by 21-year-old Kane Parsons from his creepypasta-inspired YouTube shorts.
Unveiled in August 2018 by Henderson, a Canadian horror artist and illustrator, the Siren Head IP revolves round hand-drawn monsters digitally composited into actual images. The character is a roughly 40-foot-tall, gaunt, emaciated humanoid determine — a predator looking in rural cities and wooded areas throughout North America, which blends into environments and emits creepily distorted audio broadcasts to confuse and lure in prey.
Siren Head‘s rise to mainstream visibility was accelerated by Markiplier, the content material creator behind this 12 months’s indie breakout Iron Lung, who started masking the property on his YouTube channel in 2020. From there, it’s turn into a fixture of horror content material throughout social media, with fan-generated content material racking up many hundreds of thousands of views.
Heretofore finest identified for No One Will Save You, the Kaitlyn Dever-led sci-fi horror movie for twentieth/Hulu, Duffield has the buzzy survival thriller Whalefall, primarily based on the novel by Daniel Kraus, developing for launch by way of twentieth on October 16. Cregger, in the meantime, releases his Resident Evil film starring Whalefall‘s Austin Abrams on September 18.
THR was first to the information on Siren Head.
