Siren Head: The First Post-Backrooms Creepypasta Movie Has Been Greenlit

Hollywood has discovered that the information super-highway is a big deal with the kids, and a lot of people on that magical service are making their own movies and lore. How curious. And they’re doing this without the stranglehold of a media monopoly dictating their every move? Is that legal? Now that Backrooms is a massive hit, the film industry has learned an important lesson. Is it to hire young talents with distinctive voices to craft their own tales? Nope, it’s to dig more into public domain material and milk it! A ton of creepypasta is free, babes. And so a hot new diva enters the villa: Siren Head!

Warner Bros. was the victor of a five studio bidding war for the rights to Siren Head, a character created by illustrator and creature designer Trevor Henderson. It’s tall, skeletal, rotting, and, yes, has sirens for a head. Zach Cregger, still riding the high of Weapons being both a box office hit and an Oscar winner, will co-write the script with Brian Duffield, whose upcoming film Whalefall has a lot of good buzz and inspired a brand new phobia in many of us.

Siren Head is a pretty cool design, and like the best creepypastas, its world-building and lore sprung up organically through horror communities and everyone pitching in their perspectives. You can find fanfics, YouTube essays, fanart, cosplay, and Roblox characters, all centred on Henderson’s distinctive art. Apparently, Gen Z has a particular love for Siren Head, which may explain why five studios went nuts bidding for this thing that has no specific plot or tangible themes. Compare that to Backrooms, which also had sprawling mythology but was adapted from one creator’s specific interpretation of it.

You can practically smell Hollywood’s flop-sweat eagerness to cash in on the success of Backrooms, which everyone except for them saw coming. Much like how Barbie made all these executives think that people desperately wanted more movies based on toys, they think that everyone now craves internet lore adaptations of any kind, regardless of the story or talent. At least this one has two great horror writer-directors attached. Here’s hoping they turn this into something more than a few jump scares.