The next big-name horror director to keep your eye on? None other than Connor Storrie.

If there are any lessons to take from this summer’s box-office haul, it’s that all the new great horror directors started out as YouTubers. Curry Barker’s gnarly Obsession has been the talk of Twitter and group chats since mid-May; then there was Kane Parsons’ Backrooms, which only took 10 days to become A24’s highest-grossing movie ever. Between those and other examples, like gaming YouTuber Markiplier’s $50-million-plus-earning feature debut Iron Lung, the video platform has become a true breeding ground for filmmaking talent.

Connor Storrie, who of course is already famous for different reasons, appears poised to join that club. Over the last couple of months, the ultra-viral 26-year-old has been quietly dropping short horror films on a YouTube channel under the handle Sin Monger. Last week, he uploaded a link to one of the films on his Instagram story: “Old to me, new to you,” read the caption. (Despite only just putting it on the internet, Storrie originally made the film in 2024.) The short is called Coax and it is, for the lack of a better word, weird. Which we mean as a compliment.

Shot in black-and-white, with a cool experimental vibe, it stars Storrie’s close friend and longtime collaborator Bailey Tait as a woman who is haunted by a creature with greasy, stringy tendrils. (She also chows down on some raw fish for reasons unexplained, but it ups the freaky factor.) Scares aside, there’s a lo-fi charm to the project that feels strangely timeless: had this been uploaded two decades ago, you could imagine it becoming one of those early staples of internet folklore, the kind that had kids crowding around a boxy desktop monitor in morbid fascination.

It’s been two months since Storrie launched the channel. He has thus far release two shorts: the aforementioned Coax, plus Jerry the Ginger Eater, made last year but uploaded in April. While Coax is unsettling (and kind of crazy), Jerry is more of an absurd horror-comedy, centered on a cannibal whose human diet is limited, bizarrely, to redheads. In the 15-minute long short, he picks up a sex worker as his intended next victim, but his murderous plan is derailed when she puts up a fight—that and he discovers that her amber locks are actually a dye job. The film is strikingly stylish, with a heat-map color palette, like the saturation has been dialled up to eleven.