Siren Head: Weapons’ Zach Cregger to lead next internet meme movie

It was never going to take long for Hollywood to announce another movie based on an internet meme.

Warner Bros will bring a film about Siren Head, which is a fictional towering, long-limbed character that has, as the name suggests, two sirens where a head should be.

Siren Head was created by Canadian illustrator Trevor Henderson and first appeared online in 2018 when Henderson posted it to his social media accounts. It spread via online games, forums and videos.

One video, which featured Siren Head lumbering through a suburban area and scored to the sound of gunfire and police sirens, garnered tens of millions of views. Siren Head is generally portrayed as a predator.

So, Siren Head doesn’t have a traditional narrative origin with drawn-out lore, but hot off the success of Backrooms, another internet-spawned film, it’s not surprising that this prompted a bidding war.

Not only that, it has two legitimate names involved with the project: Zach Cregger, who will co-write the screenplay with Brian Duffield, with the latter slated to direct.

Cregger started off in comedy but has become one of the biggest names in horror with his films Barbarian and Weapons.

Weapons earnt at the box office almost 10 times its production budget, as well as actor Amy Madigan an Oscar for her eerie performance as Aunt Gladys. Cregger also has upcoming a reboot of Resident Evil.

Duffield directed Spontaneous, No One Will Save You and the upcoming Whalefall, which stars reunites Weapons stars Austin Abrams and Josh Brolin in a movie about a scuba diver who becomes trapped inside the belly of a whale and has one hour to escape.

It might be surprising that something as seeming intangible as an internet meme can command a bidding war, but Hollywood is on the hunt for intellectual property that can appeal to young audiences.

Horror has been one of the most consistent genres in attracting younger demographics to cinemas, and when you marry that with concepts that were birthed online, it becomes a competitive package.

Backrooms is still in cinemas and has so far grossed $US330 million from a $US10 million production budget. It was directed by Kane Parsons, a 20-year-old first-time feature filmmaker who was commissioned when he was 16, based on a series of web videos he created off the Backrooms “creepypasta”.

A “creepypasta” is a term used to describe internet memes that have a horror tinge that have become urban legends online. Backrooms originated as a photo posted to an online forum, and from there it grew into something which eventuated in the film that starred to Oscar nominees in Renate Reinsve and Chiwetel Ejiofor.

An extended cut version of Backrooms with an extra 16 minutes of footage will hit cinemas this week.

Siren Head will be a measure of whether Backrooms is an outlier or if online memes will be a legitimate archive of source material for mainstream cinema.

In 2018, the Slender Man movie, based off the creepypasta that had been around since 2009, came and went without too much fanfare. It was a moderate box office success but had been critically panned and didn’t trigger an avalanche of similar projects.

The success of Backrooms feels different, coming almost a decade later in a post-Covid environment where traditional studios have ceded more of its cultural cachet - and revenue - to online culture and internet giants.

It also intersected with the enormous success of Obsession, a horror movie which has grossed $US375 million from a production budget of less than $U1 million. Obsession has a more conventional story, a version of the monkey’s paw narrative, but its writer-director, Curry Barker, is a YouTube creator.

Siren Head will be the next, but it won’t be the last.