One of indie horror’s quietest success stories is heading to the screen. Fears to Fathom, the episodic first-person horror series from developer Rayll Studios, has been optioned for film and television by Scarlet Stallone’s SRYN Productions, Deadline reported exclusively on Friday, with on-the-record statements from both Stallone and series creator Mukul Negi.
What was announced
Per Deadline, SRYN Productions has optioned the rights to the Fears to Fathom franchise for development in both film and television. Stallone, who plays Spencer on Paramount+’s Tulsa King and runs SRYN as a development company, is partnering directly with Negi, who develops under the name Rayll. No studio, network, writer, director, cast or timeline has been announced, and we’d treat anything you see beyond that as guesswork.
Stallone’s pitch is that of a player first: “I’ve been playing video games since before I could read, and the first time I played Fears to Fathom, I was hooked,” she told Deadline. “Rayll’s games are grounded and genuinely unsettling, because the horror comes from situations that could actually happen to you.”
Negi, who started the series as a personal project while studying at Delhi Technological University, said Stallone “immediately understood that what makes Fears to Fathom work isn’t just the scares — it’s the feeling that these situations could happen to anyone.”
What Fears to Fathom is
If you’ve never played one, the format is simple and effective: each episode is a standalone, first-person story with its own protagonist, framed as being inspired by real-life experiences, and the horror comes from ordinary situations tipping into dread rather than monsters or lore. There are six episodes on Steam so far:
- Home Alone (July 2021, free)
- Norwood Hitchhike (January 2022)
- Carson House (January 2023)
- Ironbark Lookout (October 2023)
- Woodbury Getaway (September 2024)
- Scratch Creek (June 2026)
Deadline reports the free first episode has passed 2.3 million downloads on Steam and the paid follow-ups have sold more than 1.25 million copies combined; those figures come from the announcement rather than an independent tracker. Negi founded Rayll Studios in 2023 after first getting noticed for the puzzle game Loopables.
Why it translates
Our read: this is one of the more natural game-to-screen fits in a while, and the reason is structural. Fears to Fathom is already an anthology. Each entry is a self-contained story that runs an hour or two, with a new lead, a new location and a clean ending, which is exactly the shape of an anthology TV season or a contained low-budget feature. There’s no sprawling mythology to compress and no beloved protagonist to miscast. What the adaptation has to protect is the tone: the long, quiet stretches where nothing is wrong yet, and the moment you realize it is.
It also lands in a good moment for the category. Indie horror games have become a reliable pipeline for screen projects; the one recent example everyone will reach for is Blumhouse’s Five Nights at Freddy’s, and Blumhouse added another at NYCC last week with an Amanda the Adventurer film. Fears to Fathom is a different flavor, closer to true-crime creepypasta than mascot horror, and that’s the gap it could fill.
We’ll update as SRYN and Rayll say more. For more horror on The Nerd Wire, see our Horror section and the Screamfest 2026 hub.
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