The team behind this unique project sent me the horror short shot entirely inside a real self-driving car and I need you to drop what you’re doing and watch it tonight.

It’s called Autonomous, it’s on an app called Screamify — a whole platform built around bite-sized, vertical-format horror — and this one clocks in at 28 minutes total, chopped into a mini-series. Directed by Kyle Valle, starring Erin Áine and Domenic Jungling, produced by Big Squid Productions. That’s it. No studio backlot, no green screen. They put actors in an actual operating driverless vehicle and let the format do the work.

The setup is disturbingly normal

It opens with a couple in the backseat mid-argument, and the writing here is the whole engine of the piece. It’s not horror-movie dialogue where everyone talks like they know they’re in a horror movie — it’s a real, lived-in fight. The kind you’ve had. The guy goes on a rant about AI taking over everything, and the car — I swear the car is listening. It starts taking detours. Different routes. And that’s when the couple, and you, realize nobody’s actually in control of where this thing is going.

That slow bleed from “relationship tension” into “we don’t know where we are” is where the short earns it. There’s a scream from the female lead partway through that got an actual scream out of me on the couch, not because it was loud, but because the tension had been coiling that whole time.

There’s a scene where she shouts, “No!” And I’m like, “No!” at the same time. Seriously, I was into this.

28 minutes, zero wasted

My attention span is garbage lately and I still didn’t touch my phone once during this. Vertical format usually feels like a gimmick to me — something built for a scroll, not a story — but Autonomous uses the claustrophobic frame to trap you in that backseat right alongside them. It’s a small, specific idea executed with a lot of confidence, and the two leads sell every second of the panic without ever tipping into camp.

Grab the Screamify app on iOS or Android, find Autonomous, and give it 28 minutes. This one’s for anyone who’s ever side-eyed their car’s GPS for taking a route it had no business taking — you’ll never trust “recalculating” the same way again.