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A Short-Film Veteran Bets Big on Small Budgets and Contained Terror
After 15 years of making chilling short films out of the UAE, Faisal Hashmi is going feature-length with a company of his own. The Dubai-based writer-director has formally launched Spine Drop Pictures, a genre label built around lean, high-concept horror, and he’s arriving with three scripts ready to go. Deadline has the exclusive, and the timing for a horror outfit’s debut could hardly be better.
Hashmi’s shorts, including Amber, Wicken and Skipped, have played scores of festivals and racked up more than three million combined views on YouTube. That do-more-with-less experience is the whole model here: every Spine Drop feature is designed to come in under $1 million, using few locations and concepts strong enough that the tight budget feels like a creative choice rather than a compromise.
Hashmi will write and direct all three of the opening projects. Off Plan is an interlocking anthology of six stories set across Dubai during one night, structured so each segment can be shot on its own schedule with a shared crew. Cinder is a rugged supernatural thriller set in the remote mountains of the UAE and grows out of Amber, his award-winning 2020 short about a highway-town barber who goes up against the man who kidnapped a young girl. Latching, which he calls a feminist possession-revenge story, plays out over a single brutal night in Karachi, Pakistan.
Separately, Hashmi is lined up to write and direct Fractal, an English-language time-loop horror-thriller with Jason Flemyng and Gabriela Vargas that Vienna’s Pont Pictures is producing for a 2027 shoot in Serbia. He pointed to recent low-budget breakouts like Obsession, Undertone and Good Boy as proof of the approach, and said a lasting industry is “built on making films that can find audiences, recover their investments and help finance the next one.” The company is now looking for slate investors, co-production partners and distributors.
Company: Spine Drop Pictures (UAE)
Founder: Faisal Hashmi
Slate: Off Plan (horror anthology), Cinder (supernatural thriller), Latching (possession-revenge horror)
Writer/Director: Faisal Hashmi
Budgets: Under $1 million per feature
Release Dates: To be announced
Source: Reporting and confirmation via Deadline.