Four ways to fill a horror app: how TerrorBox stocks its vertical catalogue

On 6 November, Deadline reported that Vasaria Pictures, a genre label founded by the Saw writers Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan with the producers Sean Gowrie and Nick Phillips, has signed with TerrorBox. TerrorBox is a streaming app for vertical horror: series of short episodes filmed upright for a phone, the format also called microdrama. The two companies will develop short-form projects, often with new horror filmmakers, and try to turn some of them into feature films.

The deal is the fourth way TerrorBox fills its catalogue. Deadline lists the three others in the same piece. The app bought an independent series, Dead Signal. It took a library of 90-second shorts, Nightmarish TV. It has a deal with a creators' collective, Echo Cell.

Who runs it, and since when

TerrorBox belongs to Box Entertainment Group, which Ryan Justice set up in 2025, according to Deadline. Justice is a director; IMDb credits him with Followers (2017) and The Wild Man: Skunk Ape (2021). The company's Google Play page gives an address in Tampa, Florida.

Three sources give three launch dates. Deadline wrote that TerrorBox launched "earlier this year". In July, the Echo Cell announcement set the app launch for August 2026. TerrorBox's own blog posted "TerrorBox is live" on 14 October. Asked which date the company uses, Justice told VerticalDrama TV on 10 November that he prefers to say October. The Android app and the website are live, and the iPhone app is nearly ready, he said. On 10 November, the Android app showed "50+" downloads on Google Play, the store's band for 50 to 99 installs. The count leaves out viewers who watch in a browser at watch.terrorboxtv.com.

The home page carries the slogan: "No rom-coms. No superhero slop. No feel-good garbage."

Route one: buy a finished series

TerrorBox's launch post says the catalogue "leads with" Dead Signal. Siblings return to their childhood home after the deaths of their brother and parents, and find something still in the house. The series runs 17 episodes and the first is free, according to TerrorBox's launch post. Deadline credits Rick Shepherd and Benjamin Steeper as writers and directors. IMDb lists Backyard Shorts as the production company, a 9:16 frame, 24 minutes in all, and a US release on 25 May 2026. That is before TerrorBox's "live" post of 14 October.

Deadline calls it an independent acquisition, with "an ensemble of performers from the vertical entertainment space". Three of the seven actors Deadline names, Aaron Oberst, Candace Mizga and Zachary Rist, have pages on this site for their work in other vertical series. In the nine episodes shown on the series page, the shortest runs 47 seconds and the longest 1 minute 55.

Route two: take a library

Nightmarish is a studio founded in Atlanta in 2024 by Madison Hoover and Jaime Lucero Jr.. According to TerrorBox's blog, the pair choose a theme each month, write four scripts of 90 seconds or less and release one a week. Each episode stands alone. On TerrorBox, three themes are online: Ouija, Slasher and Augmented, four episodes each.

Deadline wrote that TerrorBox "bought the Nightmarish TV library". Nightmarish also streams on BloodStream, a horror, thriller and science-fiction streamer owned by Studio Dome. BloodStream premiered it on 28 June as its first vertical series built to be watched in order, ScreenAnarchy reported. The quotes from Hoover and Lucero on TerrorBox's blog use the same words as BloodStream's June release, without the sentences that name BloodStream. "Every episode is a complete story with a feature-length world behind it, so the series doubles as a proving ground for ideas that can scale," Lucero said in both versions. Neither company has said whether one of them holds exclusive rights.

Route three: a collective

Echo Cell Productions, led by David J. Wing, runs the Echo Cell Collective, a network of horror creators in Brazil, the United States, the United Kingdom, Chile and elsewhere. The July announcement said the two companies would "produce and market" vertical horror shorts, "distributed across multiple platforms", which leaves Echo Cell free to sell its films to other services. The release set the first films for August 2026, at the same time as the app launch.

"We're not just making short films — we're creating moments of pure dread that fit in your pocket," Wing said in the release. In September, TerrorBox's blog described a development partnership, with projects built for the 9:16 frame from the start, and named a first series of shorts, Cell Bound Echoes.

Route four: a label

Vasaria brings its own projects, according to Deadline. TerrorBox will release Jezebel, a short directed by Phillips and written by and starring the TikTok creator Claire Dellamar, as a vertical series. Vasaria is developing the same story as a feature. The two companies will also adapt Fate, a screenplay by Melton and Dunstan, for vertical. The pair wrote Saw IV, Saw V, Saw VI and Saw 3D. Vasaria will look at TerrorBox titles that could become films.

"We have been exploring the vertical space for some time, and after meeting Ryan, we knew we had found the right partner," the Vasaria team said in a statement quoted by Deadline.

"Vertical storytelling offers an entirely new canvas for horror, challenging filmmakers to rethink how they build suspense, create tension and scare audiences," Justice told Deadline.

With Jezebel, one short becomes both a vertical series and a feature. Last week we followed Summer Session, a story developed as a vertical series and a film at the same time. In October, Room418, another horror app, built part of its slate on a 1968 film, a Wattpad story and a TikTok creator.

Before the four routes: the founder's own films

Some titles predate every deal. Justice runs a production company, Justified Films, in Tampa Bay. Its films page lists Bright Lights, Dark Shadows and Rogue Island as directed by Justice. Both are on TerrorBox. Bright Lights, Dark Shadows is a vampire story in 5 chapters, from 57 seconds to 2 minutes 6. The app credits Justice as director. On 10 November its page showed 103 views. Rogue Island, a revenge story set in 1986, in 2 parts and also credited to Justice, is in the action row. The Wild Man, which Justified Films calls its Florida Bigfoot movie and says was released on the free streaming service Tubi, is listed as coming soon.

The door is also open to outsiders. TerrorBox's home page asks for vertical series, short films under 40 minutes and feature films in horror, thriller, suspense or the supernatural.

Two apps, one catalogue

Deadline describes Box's model as "genre-specific platforms": TerrorBox for horror, AxnBox for action, adventure and westerns. Both apps are on Google Play under the same developer. On 10 November, AxnBox showed "5+" downloads. TerrorBox showed "50+".

The catalogues overlap. On 10 November, Dead Signal was streaming on AxnBox, tagged thriller and slasher, next to Ouija and Augmented from Nightmarish. TerrorBox, for its part, has an "Action" row. Both apps use the same player and layout, and load their posters from the same image files. The Wild Man: Skunk Ape is listed as "coming soon" on both.

The two apps do not move at the same pace. "TerrorBox is main focus," Justice wrote to VerticalDrama TV on 10 November. AxnBox will launch properly in January, he said, with an original vertical action series that is now in post-production.

How TerrorBox charges

Locked episodes are opened one by one with coins, an in-app currency, which can be bought or earned by daily check-ins, ads and invitations. The VIP plan costs $7.99 a month or $59.99 a year, which comes to $5.00 a month. VIP removes ads and opens the titles marked "included with VIP". "Some premium series are sold separately," the store says. On AxnBox, the full Dead Signal sold for $2.99.

The Dead Signal page on AxnBox showed "2.7K views" on 10 November, and it does not say whether that counter includes TerrorBox.

Justice at the Micro Drama Summit

On 12 November, Justice speaks at the online Micro Drama Summit in a session called "Blood, Bullets & Cliffhangers: The Future of Genre Verticals". The programme opens with "Romance built the vertical drama boom" and ends on a question: "could horror and action drive the next big wave of vertical entertainment?"