The horror streamer opens a new medical-horror development slate with an original feature about a celebrity ASMR chiropractor whose first livestream ends in an on-camera death. Calvin Morie McCarthy directs Peyton Grace Bell and Alexander Molina; the film premieres exclusively on Screamify later this year.
Screamify, the independent horror streaming platform, announced today that it has green-lit “Crack,” an original medical-horror feature — and the platform’s first venture into ASMR horror — about a chiropractor whose soothing ASMR livestream channel turns deadly when a patient dies on camera in front of thousands of viewers.
Produced and directed by Calvin Morie McCarthy of 7th Street Productions, the film stars Peyton Grace Bell, Alexander Molina, and Tuesday Knight — the actress horror audiences know as Kristen Parker in “A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master.” Principal photography is set for this fall in Portland, Oregon, and “Crack” is scheduled to premiere exclusively on Screamify later this year.
In “Crack,” Anna West (Bell), a fragile young woman fresh out of a halfway house, falls asleep every night to the whispered voice of Dr. Ryan Love (Molina), the Seattle chiropractor behind a hit spine-cracking ASMR channel. When his devoted office manager, Rita (Knight), suddenly vanishes, Anna walks into Love Chiropractic and makes herself indispensable — running his schedule, growing his channel, and answering his lonely fans in his voice. As the line between devotion and design disappears, everything converges on the channel’s biggest gamble: a live broadcast with real first-time patients, a climbing viewer count, and a neck adjustment that goes sharply, irreversibly wrong. The film’s tagline: “Safe. And Sound.”
The film arrives at the peak of a real internet obsession. Chiropractic “cracking” videos are one of ASMR’s signature genres — the hashtag associated with the trend had drawn billions of views on TikTok, and the format’s most popular practitioners command followings in the millions, a phenomenon 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; millions of people fall asleep each night to the sound of a stranger’s spine being cracked.
“The most comforting corner of the internet is built entirely on trusting a stranger’s hands, and ‘Crack’ turns that trust into a nightmare, live on stream,” said a Screamify representative. “Medical horror is a new development area for Screamify, and ‘Crack’ — ASMR horror to its bones — is the first green light on that slate. Wellness culture, parasocial intimacy, the theater of care — it is a rich vein for the genre, and the company intends to keep mining it.”
Knight brings one of horror’s storied franchise histories to the film. She starred as Kristen Parker in New Line Cinema’s “A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master” (1988), taking over the role from Patricia Arquette, and wrote and performed the film’s opening theme, “Nightmare.” She later appeared in “Wes Craven’s New Nightmare” and the definitive franchise documentary “Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy.” Her four-decade career spans “General Hospital,” the Joel Schumacher series “2000 Malibu Road,” “The Fan” opposite Robert De Niro, “The X-Files,” and a recent return to independent horror. Her casting comes as Hollywood heads back to Elm Street: earlier this month, Paramount Pictures and the estate of Wes Craven announced a new “A Nightmare on Elm Street” film — the franchise’s first since 2010 — putting the series Knight helped define back at the center of the horror conversation.
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,” which he stars in and produced, had its world premiere at the Dances With Films festival at the TCL Chinese Theatres in Los Angeles this June. He is a co-founder of the production company SPAM Pictures.
Bell, an actress based in Wilmington, North Carolina — one of the country’s storied film-production hubs — leads the film as Anna West in her first starring feature role. Her credits include the North Carolina-shot found-footage horror film “The Devil’s Stomping Ground” (2022), the comedy “The Re-Education of Molly Singer” (2023), and Prime Video’s “The Summer I Turned Pretty.” She also stars in the upcoming feature “Unfinished.”
McCarthy, who produces and directs, has made more than a dozen independent horror features through his Vancouver, Washington-based company, 7th Street Productions, including “Conjuring the Beyond,” “Pillow Party Massacre,” and “The Lizzie Borden Game,” released worldwide by Breaking Glass Pictures. The New York Times picked his “Insidious Inferno” for 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,” the Screamify representative added.
About Screamify
Screamify is an independent horror streaming platform dedicated exclusively to bold, original, and underrepresented voices in the genre. Featuring a growing curated library alongside Screamify Originals, the platform is pioneering new storytelling formats including its proprietary Micro Horrors™ — vertically shot episodic series designed specifically for immersive mobile viewing. Screamify is available on iOS, Android, Apple TV, Roku, Fire TV, Android TV, and Samsung smart TVs, with LG coming soon.