Jason Sondhi
The Littles caught our eye 5 months ago when it premiered on YouTube to no small measure of acclaim—the film raced to 3M views and, at the peak of YouTube-to-Hollywood discourse spurred by the success of Obsession and Backrooms, we wondered whether its director, Andrew Duplessie, could follow a similar path.
Turns out, we were already late to the party—Paramount had “premptively” secured the rights to the short in December alongside the production company 18hz.
Kudos to Duplessie, who is set to write and direct the feature version, as this short has exactly what I want in a viral YouTube success. Longtime readers know that I’m not a native to the horror genre and can be out of sync with the larger fandom when prioritizing things like character or story over the genre’s unique charms. But The Littles is a terrific all-arounder: a genuinely intriguing premise, strong grasp of horror mechanics, and a craft element that is noteworthy. It’s not deep, but at 5min, it can’t be expected to be, yet its closing beat functions more like proof-of-concept worldbuilding than a viral horror jump-scare, which I appreciated.
More on that craft element, the film features quality stop-motion animation from veteran Laika and Guillermo del Toro animator, Anthony Scott, which really works for me. Stop-motion horror is one of my fave sub-genres, and I found it novel for the short to have a “hook” outside of its premise. The del Toro influence feels present in the design, invoking Mexico’s terrific tradition of spooky stop-motion as seen in the work of figures like Sofía Carrillo or Karla Castañeda.
The Littles is an incredibly well-crafted production that feels engineered to succeed, and perhaps that could be considered a demerit? Part of the charm of the YouTube-to-movie pipeline is that it feels organic and orthogonal to Hollywood ladder-climbing, but Duplessie’s approach to success is a modern, all-front assault that I find sort of fascinating.
Duplessie comes from tech, where he sold a startup in 2019. He pivoted to the creative arts and produced on the horror anthology TV show American Horror Story. Short stories have been the spec development sensation of the past few years, and Duplessie started writing viral short stories on Instagram, where he has grown a following of over 300k. Next, he tackled TikTok (200k+), before leveraging this attention into a book deal. To ensure advance buzz for The Littles, he cast Violet McGraw, well known for M3gan and The Haunting of Hill House, as his lead, and premiered the film at a fandom event—New York Comic Con—before tackling the festival circuit, where he picked up awards at prestigious stops like Indy Shorts.
So, I began the review talking about the short as a YouTube story, but that’s not true—the film’s YouTube success is more a culmination of a careful and logically staged rollout across mediums, leveraging social media, and the traditional PR infrastructure of events and celebrity. It’s not novel, but it’s a blueprint that I think we will see a lot more of in shorts in 2027 and beyond, for both good and ill. For those who find that somewhat distasteful, rest assured, none of it works if the work isn’t great. The Littles, however, has the goods.