Lethal phrase "Zach Cregger Siren Head movie" sends Hollywood into animalistic bidding frenzy

Cregger will reportedly write and produce a film based on Trevor Henderson's iconic internet horror creature, with Brian Duffield expected to direct.

By William Hughes | July 1, 2026 | 5:21pm

Film News Zach Cregger

Although it hasn’t had quite the same tail as Curry Barker’s contemporaneous low-budget horror flick Obsession, Kane Parsons’ Backrooms has at least succeeded on one metric: Convincing Hollywood studios that there’s cash to be found down in the YouTube creepypasta mines, with numerous reports of studios both large and small sending their scouts hunting for ever more copyright-light properties they can drag before young audiences raised on stories of Jeff The Killer or “The Rake.” Now, they’ve come back with a sentence that, like so many “secret lost episodes of The Simpsons where Bart’s head is a skull or whatever,” is certain to send those who view it—or, at least, cheapo-horror-hungry 2026 film executives—into paroxysms of (potentially lucrative) madness: “Zach Cregger’s Siren Head.”

This is per THR, which reports that Warner Bros. Pictures has come out as the winner in a surprise bidding war that broke out around the horror project, which Weapons‘ Cregger is set to write and produce alongside Whalefall‘s Brian Duffield, with the latter also expected to direct. The package would center on, well, Siren Head, a creature that’s typically depicted as a 40-foot-tall stick insect kind of thing with two sirens in the place of it head, and which uses mimicry of urban structures in order to stalk and “Whatever we can handle on a $500 budget and whatever YouTube’s standards will allow” its various victims.

Among its various online horror ilk, Siren Head is fairly unique in having a known creator with actual ownership of the character attached: The creature was posted to the internet back in 2018 by artist Trevor Henderson, although it’s since propagated out in a million or so TikTok videos, ambiguously authorized video games, and other bootleg-adjacent forms that have both massively extended its reach—making it Baby’s First Boogeyman for a lot of kids who are now movie ticket-buying teenagers—but also sometimes defrayed Henderson’s ability to get paid for his character’s popularity. (Presumably not a problem in this case, as Henderson is signed with Verve Talent Agency, which oversaw the auction for the rights.) Henderson, for his part, has worked with Hollywood before, having served as the monster designer for Sony’s 2024 horror miss Tarot, which picked up praise for those creatures and pretty much nothing else. Cregger and Duffield, meanwhile, were reportedly drawn to Siren Head’s extensive “monster mythology,” which the interested can view in frankly exhausting amounts on various online horror wikis, and apparently found “a take into the world that jazzed them into collaborating.”

The real question, of course, is whether two points can wind up making a line here; this is the first of these deals signed since Backrooms made enough money to make executives start salivating, and it remains to be seen whether the creepypasta-to-film-success pipeline will be a fad, or an actual going concern.

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