Sam Raimi and Jordan Peele will team up as producers on Portrait of God, a feature adaptation of Dylan Clark’s viral religious horror short that Universal Pictures has picked up in a competitive bid, marking the first collaboration between the Evil Dead director and the Get Out filmmaker.
Clark will direct the feature and co-write the script with Joe Russo, expanding a seven-and-a-half-minute short that has amassed more than 8.6 million views on YouTube since its 2022 release. The original film follows a devout young woman preparing a presentation on a painting known as “Portrait of God,” which appears as a blank black canvas to some viewers while others claim to see a figure staring back.
On the studio side, Peele and Win Rosenfeld produce through Monkeypaw, working under their first-look arrangement with Universal, while Raimi and Romel Adam represent Ghost House Pictures. Russo also produces, with Chris Rosati on board as executive producer and Sam Evenson as co-producer; Universal executives Sara Scott and Jose Cañas oversee the project for the studio and Ghost House.
Clark has built a following in the online horror space, where Portrait of God drew attention for its sparse staging and theological chill. He has cited a debt to modern religious horror such as Saint Maud, and the short has already inspired academic work examining its depiction of the sacred and the terror of looking directly at a God figure that may not be benevolent.
Reaction from genre fans has swung between enthusiasm and caution. Horror sites greeted the Raimi–Peele pairing as a dream match, while message-board threads praised the short as “fantastic” and “super creepy” but questioned whether stretching its premise to feature length can preserve the tension that comes from its brevity and single, unnerving idea.
For Universal, Portrait of God extends a sustained investment in filmmaker-driven horror; Peele’s Monkeypaw has already delivered a run of original hits for the studio, and Raimi’s Ghost House continues to develop genre titles alongside his own return to directing with Send Help. The new film arrives at a moment when studios increasingly mine viral shorts as low-risk proof of concept, echoing earlier paths taken by projects such as Lights Out and Smile.
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Plot and casting details for the feature remain under wraps, but trade descriptions suggest an expansion of the short’s central image: a painting that reveals a “disquieting” vision of God to a select few. The challenge now sits with Clark, Raimi and Peele to build a full-scale theatrical horror film around a minimalist premise that has already left a mark on online viewers and horror scholars alike.
