Creep Director Patrick Brice Returns to Horror With Violet
Patrick Brice, the filmmaker who helped turn an uncomfortable encounter with a stranger into one of modern horror’s most unsettling franchises, is preparing to make audiences suspicious of their phones. The Creep director has signed on to helm Violet, a new psychosexual horror thriller featuring a cast that includes Lili Reinhart, Danny Ramirez, Suki Waterhouse, Lukas Gage and a familiar collaborator in Mark Duplass.
According to Variety, the film is an adaptation of Nick Antosca’s short story Ghostfish, with Antosca and Alana B. Lytle writing the screenplay. Production is currently planned for spring 2027, although a release date has not been announced.
The premise explores grief, obsession and the uncomfortable reality that the dead can leave behind an enormous digital presence. Considering Brice’s talent for making apparently ordinary situations feel increasingly threatening, it sounds like material particularly well suited to the director.
Patrick Brice’s Violet Brings a Dead Relationship Back to Life
Danny Ramirez plays Sean, a man who has spent two years attempting to recover from the sudden death of his fiancée, Violet, played by Suki Waterhouse. Having finally found happiness with his childhood friend Kate, portrayed by Lili Reinhart, Sean appears ready to move forward with his life.
Unfortunately, the couple’s decision to move into the house Sean once shared with Violet brings the past crashing back. Disturbing text messages begin arriving from someone claiming to be his deceased fiancée, raising questions about whether Sean is experiencing something supernatural or whether somebody has found a particularly cruel way of exploiting his grief.
The film’s central idea feels especially relevant in an age when relationships leave behind thousands of photographs, messages and online memories. Deleting somebody from your life is difficult enough when they’re still alive, but receiving messages from a dead partner would probably justify throwing the entire phone into the nearest river.
Lukas Gage and Mark Duplass are also attached to the cast, although details of their characters have not yet been revealed. The story originated in Antosca’s 2013 short fiction Ghostfish, which was published by the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Antosca has considerable horror credentials of his own, having created the anthology television series Channel Zero and co-created Brand New Cherry Flavor. His screenwriting work also includes Antlers, while he has been attached to write Smile 3, bringing another established horror franchise into his growing list of projects.
From Creep to Violet: Patrick Brice’s Uncomfortable Horror
For horror audiences, Brice’s involvement is arguably the most interesting element of the announcement. His breakthrough came with 2014’s Creep, a found-footage thriller that demonstrated how frightening a film could become with two actors, a camera and a character who seems completely incapable of respecting personal boundaries.
Brice directed and co-wrote the film with Mark Duplass, who played Josef, an apparently friendly but increasingly disturbing man who hires videographer Aaron, played by Brice himself, to record a personal video. What begins as an unusual freelance assignment gradually becomes a psychological nightmare as Josef’s behaviour shifts between awkward humour, emotional manipulation and outright menace.
Much of Creep works because Josef rarely behaves like a conventional horror villain. He can appear vulnerable, ridiculous and almost sympathetic before revealing another deeply troubling aspect of his personality. Duplass’s performance, combined with Brice’s restrained direction, creates a film in which even an ordinary conversation can become unbearable.
The pair reunited for Creep 2 in 2017, with Duplass returning opposite Desiree Akhavan as Sara, a video artist who becomes involved with the killer. Rather than simply repeating the original, the sequel explores the relationship between its characters from a different angle, making the familiar predator considerably less comfortable in his own routine.
The franchise subsequently expanded into television with The Creep Tapes in 2024, continuing the character’s disturbing encounters through shorter stories. Brice and Duplass remained central to the project, demonstrating how much mileage the concept could generate without abandoning the intimacy that made the original film effective.
Brice also directed the 2021 Netflix horror thriller There’s Someone Inside Your House, adapted from Stephanie Perkins’ novel, alongside his earlier comedy-drama The Overnight. His return to a smaller, psychologically driven premise with Violet could therefore prove particularly interesting.
With Duplass joining him once again, Violet offers another opportunity for the collaborators to explore the darker side of human relationships, although this time the threat may be arriving through a mobile phone rather than a stranger’s front door.
Filming is expected to begin in spring 2027, with further casting and release details still to come.
