The next big-name horror director to keep your eye on? None other than Connor Storey.
If there’s any lesson to be taken from this summer’s box-office performance, it’s that all of the new great horror directors started out as YouTubers. curry barker’s miser Passion Discussions have been taking place on Twitter and group chats since mid-May; Then there was Ken Parsons’ back roomwhich only took 10 days To become A24’s highest-grossing film to date. Between those and other examples, like gaming YouTuber Markiplier’s feature debut earning over $50 million iron lungThe video platform has become a veritable breeding ground for filmmaking talent.
Connor Storey, who is certainly already famous for different reasons, appears set to join that club. Over the past few months, the 26-year-old ultra-viral man has been quietly dropping short horror films on a YouTube channel under the handle. sin monger. Last week he uploaded the link of one of his films instagram story: “Old for me, new for you,” read the caption. (Despite only putting it on the Internet, Story originally planned to film it in 2024.) The short is called coax And this is, for lack of a better word, Strange. Which we understand as a compliment.
Filmed in black and white, with a cool experimental vibe, it stars Storey’s close friends and long time associate Bailey Tait stars as a woman who is haunted by a creature with smooth, fibrous tendrils. (She also eats some raw fish for unclear reasons, but that amps up the weird factor.) What’s scary is that this project has a lo-fi charm that feels strangely timeless: If this were uploaded two decades ago, you can imagine it would become one of those early staples of Internet folklore, the way kids used to crowd around a boxy desktop monitor in morbid fascination.
It has been two months since Story launched the channel. He has released two short films so far: above coaxplus jerry ginger eaterCreated last year but uploaded in April. Whereas coax is disturbing (and kind of crazy), jerry It is an absurdist horror-comedy centered on a cannibal whose human diet is, bizarrely, limited to red hair. In the 15-minute long short film, he chooses a sex worker as his next victim, but his murderous plan is derailed when she puts up a fight – and he discovers that her amber hair is actually a dye job. The film is extremely stylish, with a heat-map color palette, as if the saturation has been dialed up to eleven.
