On Friday nights, IndieWire After Dark honors fringe cinema in the streaming age with midnight movies from any moment in film history.
First, the BAIT: a weird genre pick, and why we’re exploring its specific niche right now. Then, the BITE: a spoiler-filled answer to the all-important question, “Is this old cult film actually worth recommending?”
The Bait: A Critic, Two Directors, and Cryptina(?) Walk Into a Bar
A bustling hub of multicultural film discourse each July, McKibbins’ Irish Pub in Montreal (the one by Concordia University, not Cinema L’Amor) is a pretty good time. That’s where I met filmmakers Steph and Ryan Twyford-Rigley, also in town for the 2026 Fantasia Film Festival this week and revving up to make their crowdfunded debut feature “Goat Sword.”
It’s a heavy metal vampire comedy that sounds like it might actually be destined to find real support among the French-Canadian genre crowd. But 20 minutes later and half a beer in, the two married New Yorkers weren’t talking about their new project at all. Instead, they were showing off pictures of a white-blonde horror hostess they know as… CRYPTINA!
If you haven’t heard of Cryptina, don’t feel bad. Although, that is your loss. The cult character debuted in a 12-minute proof-of-concept pilot, titled “Cryptina’s Spook-Time Variety Show,” back in 2017. She later returned for a handful of feature-length anthology hosting gigs during the pandemic, but mostly exists as a collection of online clips today. (You can find the debut Cryptina performance on Troma Now, while the 2020 segments are free on YouTube.)
A testament to awkwardness, boob tape, and the enduring influence of Adult Swim, Cryptina still has a real fanbase in Brooklyn, especially at home with the Twyford-Rigleys. The original pilot even caught the attention of Joe Bob Briggs and earned a spot in the competition to become one of “The ABCs of Death 2.5,” suggesting the character might have a future beyond the festival circuit. But like so many beloved genre oddities, that next chapter never materialized.
Cryptina’s planned TV series fell apart, an oversized coffin Ryan built for the production eventually wound up hanging from the ceiling of a local bar, and just this year, an AI imitator became such a nuisance that the filmmakers had to send a cease-and-desist. Yeah… Cryptina’s story is kind of a rough one. So, why couldn’t Steph, Ryan, and I stop talking about her?
“Whenever someone asks me if I’m embarrassed by my old work, I always say no,” the actress behind those luminous black-and-white bedroom eyes told IndieWire. “I love everything I’ve ever done. I don’t even want to call it a stepping stone because that implies that it’s a lesser thing of the past. It was a different time, and it forever brings me joy.”
That giddiness was impossible to miss once we ducked into the festival’s green room and started watching old Cryptina clips together. Steph remembered constructing the graveyard-themed set in their living room, while Ryan ran around in his underwear because the fog machine had made their city apartment unbearably hot. Remembering the ordeal, the spouses interrupted each other with behind-the-scenes trivia memories, compliments for their other collaborators, and insights into how they had both changed as artists in the years since.
“The pandemic ones were really fun to work on as a team because we actually were able to bounce ideas off of each other,” Ryan said. “We were a writers’ room, just the two of us.”
Delighting in gags they’d come up with nearly a decade ago, the Twyford-Rigleys don’t see Cryptina (or her skeleton roommate Javier!) as a false start so much as a time capsule from the beginning of their marriage. Thanks to a mutual friend and an ill-timed Facebook request, the couple first met after a Ghost concert. The date that followed lasted 14 hours, and the very next day, Steph moved to Japan and Ryan went to spend time with his father after a cancer diagnosis.
They kept the relationship alive through letters and horror-themed care packages, with Steph mailing a tiny casket full of dead roses back to the U.S. and Ryan responding with a fake severed finger attached to a ransom note — demanding she move back to New York. They still tell the story like they’re trying to convince themselves that the last part actually happened, but the creative passion that formed between the Twyford-Rigleys has been burning ever since.
In addition to the forthcoming “Goat Sword,” Steph and Ryan have worked on a slew of music videos and short films. Of course, they’re proud of their wedding video (they built a funeral pyre?!) but Cryptina will always be close to their horror-loving hearts.
“We would resurrect her immediately,” Steph said. “People have been asking.”
Cinema is unusually good at preserving memories. Not just the masterpieces and heavily worshipped cult classics, but the strange little indie efforts that become inseparable from the people who made them. Sometimes those stories survive because the ideas at their center are later recognized as great, but sometimes they exist because a few fans refused to let them die.
Years after Cryptina had seemingly faded into obscurity, Ryan was in a New York emergency room when a doctor walked in, glanced at his chart, and suddenly stopped.
“Wait,” he remembered the physician saying. “‘Cryptina’s Spook-Time Variety Show?’ That’s you?”
The doctor had caught the Twyford-Rigley’s pilot at a New Jersey film festival years earlier, and even though Ryan and Steph had never met him before, Cryptina’s spirit lived on in him — and this week, at McKibbins’ bar, she possessed one more. Well, two. Happy haunting, Wilson! —Alison Foreman (P.S. Thanks for watching my cats.)
The Bite: Elvira for the Socially Awkward
Sometimes, when you volunteer to contribute to an After Dark entry here at IndieWire, you get led to places you’ve never once thought of going before — expanding your conception of what the film world is and discovering new avenues for creativity and art. What I’m getting at here is that, to write this column, our fearless leader Ali asked me to sign up for a free trial of something called Troma Now.
The world of midnight movies has become increasingly digitized and democratized over the past 15 or so years. Streaming and social media have expanded the avenues through which filmmakers can break through. Ali is currently rubbing shoulders with the midnight crowd up north, but thanks to a tiny indie streamer, I’m able to immediately engage with the work of the people she’s meeting from the comfort of my Los Angeles apartment. And that’s how I ended up spending my Friday afternoon watching a few short films presented by a socially awkward, Elvira-esque Mistress of the Night.
Trying to do Elvira is setting yourself up for a thankless challenge. Because really, who can fill the shoes of Cassandra Peterson’s iconic character? Elvira might be one of the few truly universally beloved figures in the horror community, a vampy ghoul with a Valley Girl affect whose humor and wink-wink, nudge-nudge approach to sexuality helped her transcend her local TV origins to become a genuine legend. The gays love Elvira, the girls love Elvira, the bros love Elvira — everybody loves Elvira.
But since Peterson retired the character, it has felt like there’s been a hole in horror. More than just a character, Elvira was an ambassador, someone whose effervescent presence elevated the B-movies she presented. The modern horror landscape could use someone like her again. So, is Cryptina and her “Spook-Time Variety Show” up to the task?
Cannily, the 2017 pilot for “Cryptina’s Spook-Time Variety Show,” now streaming on Troma Now, doesn’t try to strike gold twice by presenting its ghoulish host in the same fabulous mold as Elvira. Playing the character, filmmaker Steph Twyford-Rigley instead opts for a version that feels true to our modern landscape of internet overuse and social anxiety, portraying Cryptina as someone desperately trying to be a mysterious, seductive horror host but who’s just a little too self-conscious and uncomfortable in her own skin to pull it off.
The film she presents is delightfully silly. The pilot only features a handful of shorts, but the main one is a doozy: a “Twilight” parody in which the brooding Edward Cullen is replaced by Count Orlok in biblically accurate makeup. Watching an ordinary girl swoon over this obvious bloodsucker before reenacting the iconic “I know what you are” scene from Stephenie Meyer’s vampire saga is exactly the kind of so-dumb-it’s-genius comedy I want from a horror short.
Beyond the Troma Now pilot, you can also find on YouTube the hosting segments from four feature-length anthology episodes Twyford-Rigley and her husband, Ryan Twyford-Rigley, produced during the pandemic. It’s a slightly surreal experience watching the platinum-blonde host riff on movies we never actually get to see, but it’s fun largely because Twyford-Rigley is so effortlessly charming in the role. She sells jokes about Cryptina forgetting her cues or overexplaining a cheesy punchline until it’s beaten into the ground with an endearingly self-aware sense of relatability, and she makes the banter between Cryptina and her monstrous sidekick, Ghoulsby, feel surprisingly natural.
Does she fully measure up to Elvira? Well, no. But the fact that we’re even having the conversation suggests this character has the potential to go further than these few episodes. If Cryptina isn’t quite ready for primetime (or, uh, post-primetime) TV, that’s also part of her appeal. Horror could use a host who’s just a little anxious, a little awkward, and very, very online. —Wilson Chapman
“Cryptina’s Spook-Time Variety Show” is streaming on Troma Now.
Read more installments of After Dark, IndieWire’s midnight movie club:
