A vertical frame is a tall, narrow box built around one person. Screamify’s Micro Horrors™ slate, horror made for your phone in short episodes, keeps putting a woman in that box and then making her day much worse.
Four titles are streaming in the Screamify app right now, and a fifth, Raven Mocker, is coming later this year. Here’s who you’re watching.
Lexie and Becka, Scary Mary
Scary Mary (20 episodes, directed by Joshua Alden, starring Brandi Alden and Abby Burkholder) follows Lexie and Becka. They stream as Belexie and they badly want to be famous. So they summon Scary Mary on camera to go viral.
It works, sort of. The episode titles tell you how the season goes: “Girl Talk with a Demon Babe.” “We went viral!!” “Unloyal viewers.” And then, our favorite on this site, “I’m the Final Girl,” where Lexie works out what role she’s playing and decides to relaunch her brand around it.
Amy, Autonomous
In Autonomous (16 episodes, directed by Kyle Valle), Erin Áine plays Amy, riding home from Derek’s parents’ house in a driverless robotaxi. Before anything else goes wrong it’s a relationship story in a sealed box: money, a text she won’t explain, a guy named Jake. Then the car takes a wrong turn and stops for a figure in the road, and Amy has to stop arguing and start surviving.
We wrote about Áine’s performance when the series launched. It holds up.
The woman being watched, In Sight
In Sight is the slate’s Micro Found Footage™ entry, a single episode about a young woman in Nashville who is followed by a stalker. The poster line is “You don’t know who’s watching.” Found footage puts the camera where the threat is, and that’s more unsettling when the person on screen has no idea.
And for a group, Game Night: Survive the Slasher from Trent Duncan is 32 episodes of friends fighting off a masked killer.
The witch, Raven Mocker
Raven Mocker is a 20-episode Screamify Original written by John White and directed by Gabe McCauley, and it’s coming later this year. The series takes its title from its monster. Screamify’s listing calls her a heart-eating witch out of Cherokee legend, tied to a Civil War love story that never ended. Three teenagers walk into her story in 1971.
When it wrapped we met the women who built the monster and then played it. No release date yet, just later this year. Until then, start with episode 1 of Scary Mary, Autonomous or Game Night, which are free in the Screamify app.
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