NASHVILLE — Screamify announced this week that it has green-lit 'Crack,' an original feature about a celebrity ASMR chiropractor whose first livestream ends in an on-camera death. The film is the first title in what the independent horror platform is calling a medical-horror development slate, and its first entry in ASMR horror.
Calvin Morie McCarthy directs. McCarthy has made more than a dozen independent horror features through 7th Street Productions, his company based in Vancouver, Washington, among them 'Conjuring the Beyond,' 'Pillow Party Massacre,' and 'The Lizzie Borden Game,' released worldwide by Breaking Glass Pictures. The New York Times named his 'Insidious Inferno' in its horror streaming column. Earlier this year his script 'Late Bloomer' was selected for a producers' pitch event at the Cannes Film Festival.
"Calvin is exactly the director this story needed — fast, fearless, and completely fluent in the language of independent horror," a Screamify representative said.
The film stars Peyton Grace Bell as Anna West, Alexander Molina as Dr. Ryan Love, and Tuesday Knight as Rita. Molina, a graduate of the A.R.T. Institute at Harvard University, starred in and produced 'Dash' (2022), a thriller filmed in a single unbroken take on the streets of Hollywood and released by XYZ Films; his latest feature, the coal-country crime thriller 'Coaled Blood,' premiered at the Dances With Films festival at the TCL Chinese Theatres in Los Angeles in June. He co-founded the production company SPAM Pictures. Knight starred as Kristen Parker in 'A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master' in 1988 and wrote and performed its opening theme. Bell, based in Wilmington, North Carolina, takes her first starring feature role.
The premise is drawn from a documented internet phenomenon rather than an invented one. Chiropractic adjustment videos are among ASMR's signature genres; the hashtag associated with the trend has drawn billions of views, and its most popular practitioners command followings in the millions — a subculture covered by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Vice. Researchers at the University of Sheffield have found that ASMR content can measurably slow viewers' heart rates and ease anxiety.
What the film does with that is structural. Anna West, newly out of a halfway house, sleeps to the whispered voice of a Seattle chiropractor with a hit spine-cracking channel. When his office manager disappears, Anna installs herself in the practice — scheduling, growing the channel, answering his correspondence in his voice — until the operation converges on a live broadcast with first-time patients and an adjustment that goes irreversibly wrong.
For a platform of Screamify's size, the strategy is legible: a genre lane nobody has formalized, built on a subculture with a documented mass audience, executed at independent scale. Principal photography is set for this fall in the Pacific Northwest. 'Crack' premieres exclusively on Screamify later this year.
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