You’ve Never Met a Horror Host Like 2017’s Cryptina: The Luminous Ghost of Short Films Past
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- Cryptina's Spook-Time Variety Show debuted in 2017 as a 12-minute proof-of-concept pilot and is now streaming on Troma Now, with four pandemic-era feature-length anthology hosting segments available free on YouTube.
- Steph Twyford-Rigley plays Cryptina as a self-conscious, socially awkward horror host — a deliberate contrast to Elvira's confident vamp — riffing on her own discomfort and forgetting cues with self-aware charm.
- The original pilot's main short is a "Twilight" parody that replaces Edward Cullen with Count Orlok in biblically accurate makeup, and the pilot once caught the attention of Joe Bob Briggs and earned a spot in the competition for "The ABCs of Death 2.5."
- A planned Cryptina TV series fell apart; the oversized coffin husband Ryan built for the production ended up hanging from the ceiling of a local bar, and this year the filmmakers had to send a cease-and-desist to an AI imitator.
- Steph and Ryan Twyford-Rigley met after a Ghost concert, had a 14-hour first date, and exchanged horror-themed care packages (a tiny casket of dead roses, a fake severed finger with a ransom note) while Steph was living in Japan.
- The couple are now crowdfunding their debut feature "Goat Sword," a heavy metal vampire comedy, and told IndieWire they "would resurrect" Cryptina immediately because "people have been asking."
Why it matters: For low-budget horror filmmakers, Cryptina illustrates both the democratizing promise and the fragility of cult IP in the streaming era — a character who drew Joe Bob Briggs's notice, landed on Troma Now, and built a Brooklyn fanbase still couldn't get a TV series greenlit, and is now being cloned by AI. The Twyford-Rigleys' survival strategy is to keep making work together, with "Goat Sword" as their next vehicle.
