In April, Lionsgate, Blumhouse and Atomic Monster named the director of their Blair Witch Project reboot.

His name is Dylan Clark. He's in his mid-twenties, has never directed a feature, and the short that helped get him there cost roughly $300 to make. It was shot in a classroom while he was supposed to be taking his university exams.

He's now developing a second feature at Universal, produced by Sam Raimi and Jordan Peele. A third project is in development elsewhere.

Four years ago, he was a film student with a Halloween mask.

First, a quick clarification: this is not the Dylan Clark who produced The Batman and The Penguin. Different Dylan Clark entirely.

This Dylan grew up mostly in Virginia, although his family moved around, including time spent in Austria and Germany. He started making films at around nine or ten, initially shooting homemade superhero movies. X-Men shorts, costumes made from felt, stunt dummies thrown out of windows and visual effects drawn onto freeze frames by hand. By his own admission, they weren't very good.

He eventually became frustrated enough to consider giving up. Then he watched The Blair Witch Project and it hanged the way he thought about filmmaking.

Here was a film that looked rough, was made for very little money and still managed to scare people. Clark realised that horror didn't necessarily require expensive sets, elaborate effects or monsters that needed to be seen.

Dylan then stopped making superhero films and started shooting horror in the woods behind his house.

He kept going. He submitted work to local festivals, then began putting his shorts on YouTube after seeing films like Lights Out find an audience there. The early videos didn't do much. Clark is fairly candid about the fact that they weren't particularly good.

But they got better. He eventually studied film at Ithaca College in upstate New York. When the pandemic sent him home, he continued making tiny films with his family, a period he credits with helping him improve considerably.

Today, he lives in Los Angeles and has around ten shorts on his YouTube channel. He considers only a handful of them to be work he'd confidently show someone.

One of those is Portrait of God. Check it out below, but don’t forget to come back and see how this very project changed his life.

The $300 short film

Portrait of God was released in August 2022.

It's seven and a half minutes long. A young religious woman rehearses a talk about a painting. Some people see nothing in the painting. Others see a figure in the darkness. And, strangely, they all describe the same thing.

The film wasn't made as a university assignment. Clark shot it during his end-of-year exams. The university's equipment desk was closed, so he couldn't use the usual kit. Instead, he booked a classroom and built the entire film around it.

Four lights. One day of preparation. Cast and crew arriving and leaving between exams. And the creature? Clark.

He put on a Halloween shop mask, hid himself in shadow and slimmed the footage down in post-production. Finding someone willing to stand around in a creature costume for three hours for free wasn't exactly straightforward.

The total cost came to roughly $250–$300, covering things like food, make-up and the mask.

Everything else was already available to him.

That's essentially the filmmaking philosophy that runs through Clark's work: if you can't afford to show something, find a way to make the audience imagine it instead.

How it reached Raimi and Peele

Portrait of God was by no means a viral sensation.

Clark uploaded it to YouTube and it initially did reasonably well before flattening out. When it first caught the attention of the people who would eventually develop it into a feature, it had around 50,000 views. The eight million came later.

The important part wasn't the algorithm. It was one person.

Clark had met horror filmmaker Sam Evenson several weeks before the short was released. Evenson watched Portrait of God and asked if he could send it to a producer friend, Joe Russo.

Russo sent it to Ghost House Pictures, Sam Raimi's production company. They were interested almost immediately and Clark and Russo began developing the idea as a feature. Then the 2023 writers' strike complicated the process and effectively killed the plan to simply pitch it. They then wrote the screenplay themselves, on spec. They developed it with notes from Ghost House and eventually went out with the project in June 2025.

This is when Jordan Peele's Monkeypaw became involved, they took the project to Universal in line with Monkeypaw’s overall deal, with Peele joining the pitch.

Universal ultimately bought the project in a competitive situation. Although it is still not greenlit. Four years after Portrait of God was made, Clark and Russo are continuing to rewrite and refine the screenplay based on studio notes.

But the journey from a $300 student short to a Universal project produced by Sam Raimi and Jordan Peele is already remarkable.

And then came The Blair Witch Project.

From Watching The Blair Witch Project to Rebooting It

Clark has been tapped to direct Lionsgate, Blumhouse and Atomic Monster’s reboot of The Blair Witch Project.

He's rewriting a script by Chris Thomas Devlin, with Jason Blum and James Wan producing. Original Blair Witch filmmakers Eduardo Sánchez, Daniel Myrick and Gregg Hale are executive producing, alongside original stars Joshua Leonard and Michael C. Williams.

The film is currently scheduled for release on 24 September 2027. Which brings the story full circle. At around nine years old, Clark watched The Blair Witch Project and decided horror was the kind of filmmaking he could actually make. He started making tiny horror films. One of those films eventually changed his career. And now he's been handed the opportunity to remake the film that helped start it all.