Emmy nominee Sonja O’Hara and Gotham Award nominee Sebiye Behtiyar will team up as the stars of The Scorpion. Writer-director Zachary Allard‘s horror feature debut.
Allard, currently a development executive at Gary Ungar‘s Exiles Entertainment, the management and production company that represents Guillermo del Toro and Jennifer Kent. He makes his feature directorial debut with The Scorpion. His scripts have been optioned by Caviar and Endless Media.
The Scorpion
The film is firmly entrenched in body horror. Kit (O’Hara) is a struggling young woman whose dream of creating her own clothing line has been stymied. In a desperate attempt to get money for her first collection, she takes a job at an ultra-advanced cosmetics lab. The company claims to use consenting humans for testing instead of animals. As Kit becomes more involved in the lab’s strange experiments – involving, among other things, perfume, chemicals, and invasive surgery – terrifying physical and psychological changes start to occur.
Behtiyar co-stars as Lizzie, a “winsome new recruit at the experimental cosmetics clinic who forms a deep bond with another test subject as the women endure increasingly disturbing physical and psychological transformations.”
Both of the leads are highly impressive. Behtiyar was nominated for the 2025 Gotham Award for Breakthrough Performance for his performance in Preparation for the Next Life. O’Hara recently finished work on the body horror film Snare, which co-stars Marissa Bode (Wicked ) and Greg Tarzan Davis (Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning). Making The Scorpion the trio’s second collaboration.
The film is produced by Raechel Zarzynski, Kathy Sue Holtorf, Garrett Recker, and Greg Elam. Independent Spirit Award-nominated producer Corey Moosa serves as executive producer. The Scorpion will begin principal photography in LA later this year. It is being shot by Davon Slininger, a veteran camera operator who has worked with David O. Russell and Damien Chazelle.
Slininger’s prestige filmmaking pedigree gives this otherwise lean indie movie a little visual heft.
With a talented creative team and two impressive leads, The Scorpion will be one of the more interesting little genre movies currently moving down the pipeline to late 2026.
