Viral Horror Short Ignore It Is Becoming a Feature Film With Lily Collias
The internet has become an increasingly fertile hunting ground for Hollywood horror, and another filmmaker is now making the leap from viral shorts to the big screen. Sam Evenson, creator of the Grimoire Horror YouTube channel, is turning his hugely successful 2021 short Ignore It into a feature film, with Smile producers Temple Hill Entertainment and Anton backing the project and Lily Collias set to star. Evenson will write and direct the adaptation, making Ignore It his feature directorial debut, while Anton is fully financing the film and handling worldwide sales. Variety broke the news.
It is easy to understand why the original attracted attention. Ignore It takes an extremely simple horror rule and makes it terrifying: a family is sharing its home with an entity known only as The Woman, and acknowledging her presence can get them killed. Their survival therefore depends upon behaving as though the horrifying figure standing in their house simply isn’t there. That premise gives Evenson plenty to work with without requiring elaborate mythology or exposition, and the short has subsequently amassed more than 12 million views on YouTube.
We’ll put the original short film here, so you can see what all the fuss is about before reading on.
From Reddit Horror Story to Viral Short
The journey actually began before Evenson’s film. Ignore It was based on Jeff Speziale’s r/NoSleep story You’re Going to Notice a Woman in Your Home, You Must Ignore Her, taking the central idea of an unwanted presence whose existence must never be acknowledged and transforming it into a seven-minute screen story. Evenson released his adaptation online in 2021, and its success has continued long after its initial appearance, building an audience large enough to make a feature adaptation an obvious possibility.
Crucially, the feature isn’t simply being developed around Evenson while the original creator disappears from the process. Evenson and Speziale are collaborating on expanding the premise into a feature-length story, although details of exactly how the short will be enlarged have not yet been revealed. That will be the most interesting challenge. The original concept works precisely because the rules are so immediate and easy to understand, so turning seven minutes into a full feature means finding considerably more story without losing the simplicity that made the idea effective in the first place.
Collias will play Becca, with the actress continuing a rapid rise following India Donaldson’s Good One. The 2024 drama premiered at Sundance and subsequently screened at Cannes, with Collias receiving considerable attention for her performance. More recently she appeared in Roofman, while her television work includes the new Cape Fear. Ignore It now gives her a leading role in a supernatural horror film that already comes with millions of potential viewers familiar with its central monster.
Another YouTube Horror Filmmaker Heads to Hollywood
Evenson’s move into features is part of something much bigger happening within modern horror. For decades, aspiring filmmakers made shorts in the hope that somebody within the industry might see them. YouTube has dramatically changed the scale of that opportunity. A filmmaker can now prove not only that an idea works but that millions of people actively want to watch it before a studio spends money developing the feature.
We’ve already seen that route create some fascinating new horror filmmakers. Curry Barker built an enormous online audience through shorts and longer projects before making Obsession, while Kane Parsons turned his extraordinarily successful The Backrooms YouTube series into a feature project. These filmmakers arrived with something previous generations of first-time directors rarely possessed: a sizeable audience already familiar with their work.
Evenson certainly qualifies. His Grimoire Horror channel has grown beyond 199,000 subscribers, while his collection of horror shorts has accumulated tens of millions of views. Ignore It is therefore not an unknown concept being tested for the first time at feature length. Millions of viewers have already encountered The Woman, and the feature has the opportunity to take a very compact nightmare and build an entire mythology around it.
He also brings professional filmmaking experience that might not be immediately obvious from the YouTube label. Evenson has worked as a visual effects artist, with credits including Dune: Part Two, HBO’s The Last of Us and Thor: Love and Thunder. He already has another feature adaptation in development, with his viral short Mora being developed with Neon, although Ignore It is expected to enter production first and therefore become his feature directing debut.
The Producers of Smile Are Behind It
There is some serious horror experience behind the camera as well. Temple Hill Entertainment and Anton, whose credits include Smile, are producing the adaptation. Marty Bowen, Wyck Godfrey, Isaac Klausner, John Fischer, Hal Sadoff and Ben Levine are producing for Temple Hill, with Anton’s Sébastien Raybaud and Kathy Stocker serving as executive producers. Anton is financing the picture and handling worldwide sales, with sales activity launching in Toronto.
Temple Hill has spoken enthusiastically about Evenson’s ability to frighten enormous online audiences and says the intention is to create an immersive horror experience around his filmmaking style. That makes Ignore It particularly interesting because this isn’t simply a case of a studio buying the rights to a viral short and handing it to somebody else. The filmmaker who created the short is being given the opportunity to expand it himself, with Speziale also involved in developing the feature story.
There is currently no release date, and further casting beyond Collias has yet to be announced. For now, Ignore It joins a growing collection of horror films that began not in a studio development meeting but online, where audiences had already decided they were worth watching.
And if you haven’t seen the original short yet, we’ve included it above. Just remember the rule.
Whatever you do, ignore her.
