Cineverse Turns a Horror Podcast Into a Movie — And It Says Something About Where Good Ideas Come From Now

A guy makes up monsters in his spare time. Now Hollywood can't get enough of them.

Trevor Henderson is the creator behind Siren Head and Cartoon Cat — those unsettling, internet-born creatures that have crawled out of forums and into major studio deals. His latest project, the horror podcast "Mayfair Watchers Society," is getting turned into a feature film by Cineverse, the studio behind "Terrifier 3" and "The Toxic Avenger" remake. Variety broke the news first.

I love stories like this. Not because I'm a horror guy — I'm not, really — but because of what it says about where creativity comes from these days. It didn't start in a writers' room. It started on a podcast feed.

From Found Tapes to Found Footage

"Mayfair Watchers Society" launched back in 2022 as part of Cineverse's Bloody FM network. The format is simple and clever: each episode is presented as a collection of found tapes and audio accounts, with different residents of a town encountering Henderson's strange creatures. No two episodes feature the same monster. No two residents get the same nightmare.

The movie will keep that structure. It's being built as a found footage anthology, pulling together different creatures and stories from the podcast — "The Needle," "Creekman," "Owls with Teeth," "Mr. Bag," "Anxious Dogs," "Scissors," and "The Clatter." That's a lot of monsters for one movie, but that's kind of the point. The podcast was never about one villain. It was about a world where something unsettling is always just out of frame.

Henderson isn't just handing over the rights and walking away, either. He's producing and joining the writing team. In his own words, he's looking forward to being "very hands-on" as the project moves from podcast to script to screen, working with Cineverse to pick the directors and writers and figure out how to bring it to fans the right way.

Why Studios Are Suddenly Chasing Internet Monsters

Here's the part that really caught my attention. Henderson isn't new to this. Warner Bros. won a competitive bidding war for Siren Head, and now director Brian Duffield and screenwriter Zach Cregger are turning that towering, siren-headed predator into a big-screen film. A few weeks after that deal, TriStar Pictures grabbed the rights to Cartoon Cat for its own adaptation.

Three major deals, three different studios, one guy who started out making up creepy things on the internet. That's not a fluke — that's a shift. A24's $400 million hit "Backrooms" cracked something open in Hollywood, and now studios are circling digitally native horror the way they used to circle comic books.

I find that fascinating. Somewhere out there right now, someone's building a following with nothing but an idea and a laptop, and the traditional gatekeepers are scrambling to catch up. There's no script, no formula, no permission slip required to start. You just start.

That's a theme I come back to a lot — doesn't matter if it's monsters or travel or anything else. The old path isn't the only path anymore. Henderson didn't wait for an invitation from Hollywood. He built something strange and specific, put it out into the world, and let people find it. Hollywood came to him.

What's Next

Cineverse has been busy lately — it recently re-released Guillermo del Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth" for its 20th anniversary, and it's clearly leaning hard into genre filmmaking. Henderson's represented by Verve, Redshift and Marios Rush, with the deal negotiated between his team and Cineverse's VP of Creative Development, Steven Peros.

No release date yet, no director attached, no cast. Just a world of monsters waiting for their moment.

Makes you wonder what else is quietly building an audience right now, waiting for someone to notice. If it worked for a guy writing about siren-headed creatures in the woods, what's stopping the next idea from doing the same?

Source: Variety

Earlier in this series: Hillary Clinton Teams Up With Kara Swisher for a New Kind of Political Podcast