When Erin Áine talks about her career, she doesn't describe waiting to be cast. She describes taking the wheel. When she was ready to take control of her own career, she co-founded Big Squid Productions with her now-husband, Kyle Valle, and the two taught themselves the craft from the ground up — no film school, learn as you go.
That instinct — make the thing yourself, then star in it — is exactly what makes her one of the most interesting names in horror right now. The Atlanta-born, Vanderbilt-educated actor-producer doesn't just appear in Screamify's debut Autonomous, the streamer's first entry in its trademarked Micro Horrors™ format. She produced it. A couple trapped in the backseat of a real driverless car as the ride turns lethal, stretched across a 16-episode vertical season — and the woman who built the series is the one fighting for her life on screen.
Why this matters for women in horror
The numbers explain the stakes. Women directed just 16% of 2024's top 250 films, and only 11% of the top 100 — figures that stalled in 2025. Yet horror is the genre where women keep breaking through anyway: Coralie Fargeat's The Substance pulled five Oscar nominations, and the highest-grossing film by a woman in 2025 was a horror movie. Women are also the majority of the horror audience. The genre that gave us the Final Girl — a term scholar Carol J. Clover coined back in 1992 — is finally letting women write the rules instead of just surviving them.
Áine has been candid about why that representation matters — the frustration of the roles she was sent as a young actress, and wishing she'd had more women directing, writing, and producing to look up to. Her fix was to become one.
The format she's betting on
She's planted that flag in the format with the most momentum in the entire industry. Vertical micro-drama generated roughly $11 billion globally in 2025, and horror is its fastest-growing genre — expanding at twice the rate of romance, with notably higher viewer retention. Screamify's bet with Micro Horrors™ is that real, episodic, 9:16 horror — built for the phone, not cropped down to it — is a shape the genre hasn't fully figured out yet.
Áine is proof of the through-line. She prefers the control. “There's so much freedom and opportunity nowadays to create your own projects and not be stuck in one area of the filmmaking process, no matter who you are or your background or experience, and I am here for it,” she says. In Autonomous, that control is total: she's the producer steering the project and the woman the audience is rooting for. The Final Girl isn't just surviving the story anymore. Increasingly, she's the one who made it.
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