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Since its release on 28 August, 2022, Dylan Clark's horror short film 'Portrait Of God' has racked up almost nine million views on YouTube, quickly entering the pantheon of viral horror greats. Now, three years on from the short's release, Universal Pictures has acquired Clark and co-writer Joe Russo's (The Inheritance's Joe Russo, not brother of Anthony Joe Russo) spec script for a feature version of the film. And, what's more, Deadline reports that genre masters Jordan Peele and Sam Raimi are teaming up through their respective Monkeypaw and Ghost House Pictures production companies to help bring the project to the big screen.
For those who haven't yet seen Clark's short film (which you can check out below), 'Portrait Of God' centres around a religious young academic who, while preparing a presentation on an art piece dubbed — you guessed it! — 'Portrait Of God', finds herself coming face to face with the divine in a truly unholy, deeply chilling way. How exactly Clark — who is set to direct the feature-length adaptation of his short himself — is planning to expand his seven-and-a-half-minute chiller into a fully fledged Universal horror is unknown at this point. And yet, even within the confined space of the original short, there are plenty of rich thematic hooks that could be explored in more detail with a longer runtime, especially when it comes to the way Clark's short subverts the traditionally benevolent image of God within Christianity and toys with the idea of those who can and cannot see Him (or indeed It, as the case may be.)
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Neither Sam Raimi nor Jordan Peele are strangers to wrestling with faith and spirituality in their work, be it Raimi's confrontation of literal demons and devilry in the Evil Dead series and Drag Me To Hell, or Peele's grappling with 'bad miracles' in his UFO horror Nope. As such, Clark's step up from short subject to big studio genre joint is in very good hands. Here's praying Portrait Of God will be a hell of a film in all the right ways.