The first rule of Bite Club… is that you’ve gotta watch it on your phone.
You’ve probably heard the term “verticals” being thrown around in the last year or so, but we don’t blame you if you’re unfamiliar with the new medium of micro-drama storytelling. First exploding in popularity in Asia, verticals get their name from their portrait-style filming format. They’re serialized, one-to-three-minute dramas meant to be consumed like a social media feed.
Verticals are dominated by low-budget, high-emotion storytelling, with soapy melodramas among the most popular. Not to mention monster romance and smut [complimentary], but the medium is evolving every day. One example is Bite Club, vertTV’s original supernatural thriller microseries, which will premiere at the inaugural ALZAFestival in New York City. The festival is dedicated to vertical storytelling, but for those who won't be in attendance, Bite Club will debut exclusively on the vertTV mobile app on October 27.
I’ll be the first to admit that I am still a little skeptical about verticals, because I’ve apparently entered my “Old Man Yells at Cloud” era. However, when the script comes from FANGORIA’s own Michael Varrati, is directed by Elvira's Haunted Hills’ Sam Irvin, and features a Chopping Mall reunion between Barbara Crampton and Russell Todd (on the film’s 40th anniversary, no less!), it’s a lot harder to be cynical.
Per vertTV, Bite Club is “tailored for a Gen Z audience hungry for dark academia and supernatural suspense.” Here’s the series’ official plot synopsis:
Driven by the motto “The first rule of Bite Club is: You do not talk about Bite Club,” the series centers around a scholarship student investigating the suspicious murder of her best friend at the prestigious Weddington University. Her search leads her to The Crimson Circle, a secret society hiding centuries-old vampire bloodlines. As the mystery deepens, she finds herself torn between a fellow student with secrets of his own and a magnetic insider whose connection to the society runs far deeper than she realizes.
Welp, they had me at vampire secret society, so I am most certainly tuning in. Bite Club also stars Casie Maghran, Jonah Walker, and Kyle Michael. The series was produced by Barry Barnholtz, Peter Sullivan, Ben Rosenthal, Brian Nolan, and Jeffrey Schenck.
Check out the teaser trailer below, and who knows, maybe verticals will be the next new horizon for horror stories.
And don’t forget to tune in on Sunday, October 25, 2026, at 9:00 p.m. ET (6:00 p.m. PT) to watch the FANGORIA Chainsaw Awards, written and directed by Michael Varrati, exclusively on Shudder.
