Inside the Tubi Hit Freaking Out HorrorTok With Incest, Gore and That Controversial Mouse Trap Scene

SPOILER ALERT: This article contains some spoilers about “Match,” now streaming in Tubi.

Every October sees an influx of horror movies to theaters and streaming, and it’s hard to predict which title will capture the imagination of genre fans. This year, it’s a Tubi original starring a mutant killer named Henry.

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“Match,” an original film on the free-with-ads streaming service, was released on Oct. 3. Despite having minimal advertising and no premieres at genre festivals, the film quickly gained word of mouth on HorrorTok due to some extreme scenes. Within two weeks, the Daily Mail ran an emphatic headline about the film: “Why Tubi Horror Film ‘Match’ Is Making People Sick With its ‘Repulsive’ Scenes: ‘Sickest Thing I’ve Ever Seen!’”

Danishka Esterhazy, who directed the film, says she believes the chatter about the movie proves that the creative team struck a nerve.

“It feels like a reward,” she says. “I knew, and our whole team knew, that it was a very dark and challenging story, and we really leaned into it. We pushed ourselves every day to tell a story that didn’t hold back and didn’t pull any punches. The funny thing about all those reactions on TikTok is that usually someone says, ‘This is the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen,’ and then they usually follow that up with, ‘…and I loved it!’ So I feel like we’ve hit disturbing in the right way, in a way that is cathartic, which is what I’m always trying to do. Great horror movies … you feel them in your body, not just in your mind. And I want to create that visceral reaction for the audience.”

For the uninitiated, “Match” is about Paola (Humberly González), who takes a chance on a dream guy she meets on an app. Unfortunately, she agrees to meet at his place, and soon realizes that she’s been tricked by a desperate mother, Lucille (Dianne Simpson), who wants her hideously mutated son, Henry (Jacques Adriaanse), to give her a grandbaby. For the rest of the movie, Paola must try to escape being killed and raped by the duo.

The premise sounds exceedingly dark, but the outrageous violence and setpieces allow for the catharsis of squirms and nervous laughter. Additionally, Esterhazy believes that the script, written by brothers Jon and Al Kaplan, lets viewers empathize with Paola, no matter how wild the situations became.

“I wanted to take the audience on a journey, so I wanted Paola’s world and the beginning of the story to feel more natural and to feel more mundane,” she says. “Dating apps are a reality for a lot of us. Once she ends up at Henry’s house, it becomes a house of horrors. For me, it was all about crafting the darkness, hiding visibility because it’s a labyrinth. It’s a rat trap. It’s a place where you can’t see around corners, and you don’t know what could be coming out of the dark. Her restricted area of vision is what you would see if you’re wandering through a dark room with a match.”

Relatability aside, there are two outrageous scenes that horror fans and stunned onlookers alike seem obsessed with discussing: When Lucille teaches her son Henry about the birds and the bees by masturbating him to an overly gooey completion, and when Paola avoids getting raped by Henry by snapping a mousetrap on the tip of his very large penis. Esterhazy was so thrilled by the latter scene that she cites it as “the moment I decided I really wanted to do the movie.”

“I just loved the way it flipped expectations about exploitation horror,” she says. “You think you’re going to see one kind of story, but then we actually go in a completely different direction, which I thought had a lot of comedy in that moment. I also thought it was really cathartic when you see a film where you think there’s the threat of sexual assault and women being abused, but then it actually goes in this other completely bonkers direction. I didn’t expect it, and I really loved it.

“When I had my first call with Tubi, I said, ‘I really want to do this film, but if we’re going to do it, we have to do it right,’” she continues. “We have to show the mousetrap. We have to deliver that scene because it’s so wonderful. I do think in my films I’ve had an interest in breaking the taboo of showing the penis. I feel like we see so much female nudity all the time, and I don’t understand why a penis is so triggering. So I like to break those barriers and push that envelope.”

Esterhazy says that although the scene was outrageous, the crew worked hard to consider how it would actually play out and keep everyone safe on set.

“Henry is a larger-than-life character, so everything about him needed to be larger-than-life,” she says. “There were a lot of discussions. I had an amazing prosthetic team from Dreamsmith. We also had a lot of discussions with our intimacy coordinators and our actor, Jacques, because it’s such an intimate scene. It was just making sure that we all had the same vision, that everybody was on board and comfortable with the content and what we were going to show.”

One party comfortable with the content was Tubi itself, as Esterhazy confirms that nothing was off-limits.

“I was really able to just go for it,” she says. “One of the great things about working with Tubi is that they really do offer their directors a lot of creative freedom. There’s not a lot of restrictions. They place their faith in their directors and let us play and explore and push boundaries. So I had a lot of support, and it was a pretty easy process.”

Tubi has had a handful of original movies that have popped into the consciousness of the horror community, like last year’s drag queens vs. vampires fare “Slay” and the twisty “Lowlifes,” the latter of which ended up on several genre-focused best of the year lists. This year, the streamer is also having success with “R.L. Stine’s Pumpkinhead,” a family-friendly Halloween treat that recently landed on Luminate’s ranking of the top original streaming films.

Adam Lewinson, Tubi’s chief content officer, says the unique yet universal concept of “Match” made it a great fit as one of the original horror movies the company has been producing for the past few years.

“‘Match’ came to us from the writers of ‘Lowlifes,’” he says. “We loved that script, and that movie turned out tremendously well. One of the things I love about those writers is they understand how to hit the horror beats, and they understand that, with anything these days, you really do need to cut through the clutter with your concept, or with some moments that really you haven’t seen before. The core idea behind ‘Match’ was dating horror. For anyone who’s picked up a dating app, this is obviously dating horror to the extreme.”

Lewinson says that “Match” is showing strong signs of being a hit for their platform.

“The Luminate chart is third-party validation for success,” he says. “We also have our internal metrics, so we’re watching how many viewers and how many times are they watching something. Certainly, in the horror genre, we often find repeat engagement. If you like it, you want to watch it again. That definitely happened with ‘Lowlifes,’ where there’s that twist, and you want to go back and see how you were fooled by it.”

Tubi’s catalogue of over a thousand horror and cult films — many of which are unavailable on other platforms — also gets a boost from viral horror hits like “Match.”

“We’re seeing viewers come in for a title like ‘Match,’” Lewinson says. “They read about it on Bloody Disgusting or JoBlo or whatever the blog, or they hear about it from their friends, read about it on Reddit. They watch ‘Match,’ and then they’re engaging with our deep library of horror. So it’s really important for us to continue to bring in horror fans, and the original movies are a great way to do that. It’s so gratifying to see them going deep into the library with whatever excites them in various subgenres of horror, because there are so many, and we have all of them on Tubi. It’s a deep rabbit hole to go down.”

Ultimately, Esterhazy thanks modern horror fandom for making “Match” a word-of-mouth hit.

“This has been such a great experience for a film release because there’s been so much audience engagement,” she says. “That’s super encouraging because we didn’t have a big budget, we didn’t have a theatrical release, we didn’t have a marketing campaign. But I think it’s a testimony to the power of HorrorTok. Everybody talks about BookTok, but HorrorTok is also this really vibrant community. They found this film and started talking about it and sharing it between horror fans, and so that engagement has grown organically. I’ve met so many interesting horror fans, talking with them on TikTok about the film.”

As for the future of Henry? Esterhazy is working with Tubi on another film at the moment, and hasn’t seriously considered a sequel — but never say never.

“We have not discussed a sequel, which is interesting,” she says. “It’s funny, I’ve made other horror movies where we’ve specifically left the door open for sequels and they’ve never happened. In this movie, we didn’t really set it up for any kind of a sequel, but, of course, there are survivors at the end of the movie. So it could happen.”

See exclusive behind-the-scenes photos from the set of “Match” below.