The singer and actress, Halsey, just announced Replacer, a psychosexual horror film she co-wrote with her partner Avan Jogia, who is also directing. Lilly Wachowski is executive producing. The project launches at Cannes this week, and the creative pedigree alone tells you this is not a vanity casting.
Halsey plays Proxy, a troubled DJ stranded in Montreal who falls in with a group running an underground radio station. The station’s broadcast gets warped by a mysterious signal buried beneath the city’s subway system, and Proxy has to escape before the sound turns her and her new friends into something unrecognizable.
Wachowski called the script “a surreal hyper-dive into a twitchy, conspiratorial genre mashing snarl of horror/thriller/comedy, set against the grit and grime of a rarely glimpsed Montreal subculture.” That is how people talk about films they actually believe in.
Halsey’s Horror Career Is Not a Phase
The Replacer announcement only makes sense when you look at what came before it. Halsey appeared in Ti West’s MaXXXine alongside Mia Goth in 2024, playing Tabby Martin in the final chapter of the X trilogy. Rolling Stone noted that she “more than held her own amid such a talented cast.“
Before that, she released If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power in 2021, an R-rated body horror concept film that played in IMAX theaters. The thing had elements of body horror, sexuality, and birth. It was not a concert movie with spooky lighting.
After MaXXXine, Halsey, and Ti West reunited for Bloodlust, a dark comedy series in development at Amazon. This time, she is not acting. She is the creator, writer, and executive producer. West is directing. That is a significant shift; she went from supporting cast to co-writing a feature film to running a writers’ room in the span of two years.
Replacer is the next step in that progression. Co-writing the screenplay puts her on the same level as the director, and the film’s creative team (Wachowski’s involvement through Anarchists United, Montreal as a shooting location, the Cronenberg-adjacent body horror premise) signals a project aiming for genre credibility, not mainstream crossover.
Pop Stars and Horror Keep Finding Each Other
Halsey is the most visible example of this trend right now, but she is far from the only one. Dread Central pointed out that Replacer follows a wave of horror films centered on musicians that includes Smile 2, Trap, Opus, and Mother Mary. Those films use pop stardom as their subject matter; Smile 2 built its entire horror around a fictional pop star’s mental disintegration and grossed over $138 million worldwide doing it.
The connection between musicians and horror goes back decades. Aaliyah starred in Queen of the Damned. Brandy survived a slasher sequel in I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. Kelly Rowland showed up in Freddy vs. Jason. David Bowie played a vampire in The Hunger. Debbie Harry starred in Cronenberg’s Videodrome. The crossover has always been there, but what is different now is the level of creative control musicians are demanding when they make the jump.
Halsey is not taking a cameo or playing “the singer” in someone else’s movie. She co-wrote Replacer. She created Bloodlust. She chose horror specifically and repeatedly, and she is building authorship within the genre rather than just lending her name to it. The trend is not just that pop stars keep appearing in horror films. The trend is that the smartest ones are treating horror as a serious creative home; writing, producing, and shaping the projects from the ground up.
Replacer does not have a release date yet, but with Cannes market screenings underway this week, distribution news should follow soon.