The Next Backrooms Is Coming: What You Need to Know About Siren Head Before the Movie
Death, taxes, Lionel Messi? Some things in life are inevitable, but when it comes to Hollywood success stories one thing doesn't always leads to the other.
One thing we can bet the house on is that the studios will scramble for the next big thing whenever a movie comes out of nowhere and reveals an untapped part of the market.
Kane Parson’s Backrooms — which is already back in cinemas with an extended cut — isn’t the first Gen Z horror movie based on Creepypasta lore, but it’s the first that’s broken into the mainstream and become a cultural phenomenon. This has already led to a frenzy of business over anything resembling similar IP, with Hollywood understandably eager to get their projects out as soon as possible so as to strike while the iron's hot.
All of which leads us to last week’s announcement that a feature length movie of Siren Head is firmly in the works at Warner Bros., with big names already attached behind the camera and a release date being eyed for early next year. Read on to find out everything we know so far about Siren Head and whether it has the potential to become the next Backrooms.
Siren Head: The Myths, The Origins, and The Lore
The Siren Head character was originally conceived in 2018 by Trevor Henderson, an illustrator whose brilliant knack for bringing his creations to life has earned him almost 900M followers on Instagram. After first appearing in 2018, Siren Head has become Henderson's most famous and feared creation: a being with a slender body made of both skin and cables, and with two metal speakers where its head should be. It’s roughly the shape and size of a street lamp, which allows it to hide in plain sight for long unmoving stretches while it's hunting its prey. Ughhhh!
The speakers (which have human teeth on the inside) are also a key part of its dread inducing presence — they often play music or atonal sounds or the voices of loved ones to help lure its prey, just like the sirens of old. Like a number of Henderson’s creatures, it has long slender limbs and more molars than it could ever need, and like much of his work, many of the best Siren Head images appear to be taken from afar or while driving — with the entity either caught in motion or just barely visible in the headlights.
Henderson recently started playing around with the idea of creating a found footage movie for the character. That will likely now be put on hold as Warner Bros. move forward with their production.
Everyone involved with the Siren Head movie so far
When it was announced that a legacy studio like Warner Bros. was jumping on board, it was clear that Siren Head was not going to be some kind of low budget chiller. Indeed, the studio has already lined up a few formidable names to get things moving.
The biggest news is that Zach Cregger (the filmmaker who directed Amy Madigan to an Oscar for Weapons earlier this year, and whose hotly anticipated Resident Evil reboot is set for release in September) will produce and co-write the film alongside director Brian Duffield.
If you know Duffield’s name, it’s likely because of his 2023 movie No One Will Save You, a near dialogue-free alien intruder movie starring Kaitlyn Dever. Duffield’s followup, Whalefall, is set for release this October and if the trailer is anything to go by it looks primed to be one of the most talked about movies of the second half of the year.
There's no word yet on who’s starring in Siren Head, aside from the eponymous nightmare of course, but given that Weapons breakout Austin Abrams is playing the lead in both Cregger and Duffield's upcoming movies, surely there’s every chance he’ll be in the running for this one, too.
Will Siren Head be the next Backrooms?
This is trickier to say. The basic concept of Backrooms is so rich with possibilities that Parsons really could run with it as a franchise, and in any direction he wants to. More significantly, it also had the unrepeatable quality of simply being the first of its kind and a genuinely novel phenomenon.
Duffield is also roughly twice his age, so it’s not as if Siren Head is continuing the Gen Z horror boom in quite the same way. If I had to guess, I'd imagine the budget for Siren Head will be a good bit chunkier than the $10M or so that Parsons got to work with, which means more possibilities but also a higher ceiling to have to hit, and thus less chance of being the mega-earner that Backrooms has been for A24.
Will it be successful, though? I’m inclined to say yes. Young cinemagoers are now outranking Gen X and Boomers for ticket sales and they appear to have an insatiable appetite for horror, especially the kind that comes direct from the internet. We all love to feel seen at the movies, after all, even when it’s a 40ft creature with too many teeth doing the staring.
