EXCLUSIVE: Here’s a nicely timed company announcement for Halloween.
Dubai-based indie director and writer Faisal Hashmi has officially launched genre-focused production company Spine Drop Pictures and unveiled its inaugural slate of three horror features.
Hashmi has won fans over his 15-year career with a collection of 10 contained, high-concept genre shorts with chilling twists, including as Amber, Wicken and Skipped, which have screened at scores of film festivals and generated more than three million combined views on YouTube.
Alongside directing, he also recently took co-writing credits on Emirati director Ali F. Mostafa’s long-awaited feature City of Life Continuum, a sequel to his breakout 2009 debut City of Life.
Hashmi is also attached to write and direct English-language, time-loop horror-thriller Fractal, starring Jason Flemyng and Gabriela Vargas, which is being produced by Vienna-based Pont Pictures and is targeting a 2027 shoot in Serbia.
Hashmi’s strategy for Spine Drop Pictures is to focus on high concept, commercially oriented genre pictures, budgeted at below $1 million and tapping into his experience of working on a tight budget with his short films.
“I’ve always looked at how can I tell an amazing story with less locations, fewer resources, but still make the concept so strong that it doesn’t feel like I’m trying to make an expensive movie for cheap, but rather a movie that feels contained and is made in the best way to make it in the first place,” he told Deadline.
The inaugural slate spans Off Plan, Cinder and Latching, which have been written and will be directed by Hashmi.
Off Plan is an interconnected horror anthology featuring six stories unfolding across Dubai over the course of a single night.
Hashmi has designed a modular shooting approach so that the six segments can be filmed as separate short-form productions that can be scheduled independently, allowing for greater flexibility and cost efficiency through shared crew and production resources.
Cinder is billed as a gritty supernatural thriller set against the unforgiving remote mountain landscapes of the UAE. It expands on Hashmi’s award-winning 2020 short film Amber, in which a barber in a remote UAE highway town finds himself up against a vicious kidnapper who has abducted a young girl. The short won best film at the UAE’s Al Ain Film Festival.
Hashmi describes Latching as a feminist possession-revenge horror film unfolding over the course of a single harrowing night in Karachi, Pakistan, where it is being developed for production. Longtime UAE resident Hashmi is of Pakistani descent.
“We’ve seen what’s possible internationally with the success of low-budget, high-concept horror films like Obsession, Undertone and Good Boy. In an emerging independent film market like the UAE, I think that approach is especially important. We need films that aren’t just creatively ambitious, but commercially viable, with a realistic potential for profitability and international appeal,” continued Hashmi on his strategy.
“A sustainable film industry isn’t built on getting one expensive film financed. It’s built on making films that can find audiences, recover their investments and help finance the next one. That’s the thinking behind Spine Drop Pictures.”
Hashimi says Spine Drop Pictures is exploring opportunities for slate investment, international co-productions, strategic financing and distribution partnerships as it advances its inaugural features.
