Warner Bros. wins bid for Siren Head rights

A five-studio bidding war over one of the latest Gen Z obsession just came to a close, with Warner Bros. Pictures winning a massive, multi-million-dollar deal to the underlying rights of Siren Head, a monster created by creature designer Trevor Henderson. 

Attached to the deal are filmmakers Zach Cregger and Brian Duffield, who will be collaborating on a script that Duffield plans to direct. Cregger previously wrote and directed Barbarian (2022), Weapons (2025), and an adaptation of Resident Evil that will come out this September. Meanwhile, Duffield’s most recent works as writer and director are No One Will Save You (2024) and an adaptation of Daniel Kraus’s novel Whalefall releasing in October.

Siren Head is a monster created by Canadian horror artist and author Trevor Henderson. It’s a humanoid creature with a very tall, emaciated body, and slick skin the color of dark copper. As the name suggests, Siren Head’s most identifying feature is the air raid sirens it has for a head, essentially serving as its mouths. It hides in plain sight, lurking within rural, wooded areas while blaring random recordings as it waits for prey to wander into its vicinity. People who unwittingly enter its hunting grounds are never seen again.

Siren Head started out as a fictional cryptid photoshopped into real photos before exploding into a viral internet sensation after famous YouTuber Markiplier played a fan-made video game based on it. Since then it has spawned countless fan theories, fan-made short films, (more) fan-made video games, and fan-merch as it became Gen Z’s newest hyperfixation. 

This story will sound familiar to fans of Slenderman. Slenderman is an internet horror monster that similarly started out as a fictional, photoshopped cryptid before blowing up in popularity after many YouTubers posted Let’s Plays of a fan-made video game titled Slender: The Eight Pages (2012). This popularity led to Sony adapting Slenderman in 2018 with Slender Man, though it was very poorly-received.

Siren Head’s internet popularity isn’t what drew Cregger and Duffield to it. Rather, it was the mythology that Henderson has slowly built-up and hinted at in his posts. Borys Kit from The Hollywood Reporter writes that Cregger and Duffield, “are said to have found a take into the world that jazzed them into collaborating and in turn, excited the studios into bidding.”

 The Siren Head rights deal is said to be in the low seven figures, and the auction brought out five of the major studios, including Sony, Universal, Paramount, and 20th Century Studios, the company behind Duffield’s Whalefall adaptation. Because a theatrical release was a key feature of the Siren Head deal, none of the big streamers were involved. At Warner, the package initially caught the attention of the executives at the studio’s new specialty division, WB Clockwork. But as the deal increased in scope, they shifted it over to the main studio.

Duffield will produce Siren Head through his company Jurassic Party Productions. Cregger joins him alongside Roy Lee and Andrew Childs of Vertigo Entertainment, the production company that produced Weapons. Scott Glassgold of 12:01 Films, which specializes in finding internet material ripe for film, is producing as well. Glassgold and Henderson have a longstanding creative partnership, starting when Glassgold hired Henderson to design all of the monsters for Sony’s film Tarot (2024).

The deal comes hot off the heels of the unexpected success of Kane Parsons’ Backrooms and Curry Barker’s Obsession over the last two months. Both of these filmmakers gained their following on YouTube, with Backrooms centering around the hit web-series of the same name created by Parsons, based on a popular 4chan post. The biggest contributor to these films’ success is Gen Z, who have been going to theaters in droves to see them. The Siren Head deal is the first of its kind since the release of Obsession and Backrooms, and it seems like it could mark the beginning of a new trend in Hollywood as studios try to attract their newfound Gen Z audience back to theaters again.

The Siren Head rights auction was overseen by Verve Talent Agency, which represents Henderson. This is the second bidding war over a heavy-hitting horror IP that Verve oversaw this year, with the previous one being the five-way studio bidding war over Texas Chainsaw Massacre that went to A24.

Credit: Trevor Henderson