Kid Cudi Is Building a Horror Filmography One Feature at a Time

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Scott Mescudi’s second directorial feature trades Hollywood’s back alleys for a stalker’s crosshairs, with Barbie Ferreira as his co-lead.

Cameras have been rolling on a rented block in Los Angeles since late August, and this time the credits behind the scenes stack even higher than usual. As news broke early from other rely source update, Scott “Kid Cudi” Mescudi is writing, directing, scoring, and starring in Wrong Number, a stalker horror thriller that marks his second directorial feature inside of a single year. Casting is handled by Skyler Zurn, whose recent credits include the Focus Features and Blumhouse horror rel Obsession, and the shoot is already deep enough into production that a premiere window has started to feel like the next real question, rather than either the film gets made at all.

Cudi shared the news himself on Instagram, frame the shoot as the payoff of years spent circling the genre from the outside before final step into it himself. His statement to Deadline was shorter and blunter, ending with a three word promise about the tone fans should expect: “There will be blood!!”

The film comes from Mad Solar, the production and music management company Cudi co-founded in November 2020 with Karina Manashil and manager Dennis Cummings, with financing, marketing, and sales support from Bron Studios. Mad Solar has spent the last several years shh build a genre footprint, from the Kenya Barris collaboration Entergalactic to backing Ti West’s A24 slasher X, and Wrong Number continues that thread while putting Cudi in front of the camera as both the credited director and the lead. Manashil again serves as an executive producer on the new film.

 

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Wrong Number centers on Ibn, a self-help author whose isolation gets interrupted by a woman named Eliza. What starts as an unexpected romance curdles fast: Ibn becomes the target of an unseen stalker, and before long he is also the prime suspect in a string of murders he insists he did not commit. It is a premise built for close quarter and mount paranoia, the kind of set where the audience spends most of the runtime unsure if the danger has arrive from outside Ibn’s apartment or from somewhere closer to home.

Cudi plays Ibn himself, a cast choice that puts his three other jobs on the film, writer, director, and composer, in direct service of a character study rather than an ensemble piece. Barbie Ferreira plays Eliza, the film’s central mystery and the hinge the entire plot turns on. Neither Deadline’s report nor Cudi’s own statement detail how the stalker plot may resolve.

The title itself carry a suggestion before a single scene has screened: a wrong number imply a connection that should never have happened, which lines up with a stalker plot built around unwanted contact and a protagonist who cannot prove his own innocence.

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Beyond its two leads, Wrong Number has assemble a support cast built from horror, comedy, and prestige television in roughly equal parts. Ferreira herself has spent the past few years moving deliberate away from television, leaving Euphoria ahead of its third season to chase smaller, stranger film roles, include the indies Faces of Death and Mile End Kicks and a recent Broadway debut in Leslye Headland’s Cult of Love. Laura Harrier, who broke out as Liz Allan in Spider-Man: Homecoming and later played activist Patrice Dumas in Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman, prior voice a role in Cudi’s Entergalactic and returns here in live action.

Clifton Powell brings four decades of supporting work to the ensemble, from Menace II Society and Dead Presidents to his NAACP Image Award nominated turn in Ray, alongside a career many younger fans know only as the voice of Big Smoke in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Dewayne Perkins, the Emmy nominated writer behind The Amber Ruffin Show who also co-wrote and star in the horror comedy The Blackening, adds a cast member who already understands genre filmmaker from both sides of the script. Lucy Barrett, known for her work in Deep Water, completes the core ensemble named in Deadline’s report.

Ferreira’s own trajectory makes her casting here feel less like a pivot than a continuation. She began as a plus size model discovered through an open casting call submission to American Apparel, became an outspoken body positivity advocate, and has spent the years since Euphoria deliberately chasing riskier, smaller projects over studio safety. That run has already included two 2025 and 2026 indies: Mile End Kicks, Chandler Levack’s TIFF coming-of-age comedy where Ferreira jure a music critic named Grace Pine, and Faces of Death, Daniel Goldhaber’s reimagine of the 1978 shockumentary, in which she play Margot Romero, a video platform content moderator drawn into a string of re-enacted murders. That second film, released theatrically in April 2026 through Independent Film Company, already had her working in genre territory before this project came along, which makes Wrong Number look less like an outlier and more like the direction her post-Euphoria career has been pointed in for a while.

The mix suggest a film less interest in horror as spectacle and more interest in horror as a showcase for actors who can hold a scene under pressure, a sensible that tracks with Cudi’s own stated influence and with the character piece Wrong Number’s logline describes. None of the support cast has spoken publicly about the project beyond Cudi’s own statement.

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Mark Webber, the actor and filmmaker who has appear in several of Cudi’s prior projects, produces Wrong Number alongside Anthony Baldino and Ryan Lacen. The three previous worked together on Doe, Cudi’s directorial debut, which suggests a production team that had already worked out its shorthand before cameras rolled on this second feature. Manashil’s role as executive producer through Mad Solar places the company’s backing, and by extension its relationship with Bron Studios, behind Cudi’s expanding directing career rather than treat Wrong Number as a one-off vanity project. Mad Solar’s earlier slate include the documentary A Man Named Scott, which chronicle Cudi’s own career, alongside Entergalactic and X, giving the company a consistent thread run from music doc into horror before this year’s pair of directorial features. Cudi and Manashil have also built out Encore Music Technologies, a separate startup aim at help artists monetize fan relation, suggest the same partner extend well beyond film into the business side of the music industry as well. Bron Studios’ involve is worth underline here too: the same backer that supports Mad Solar’s corporate operations has a track record with genre material through its work on X, which makes its continued involve in Cudi’s director slate look like an extension of an existing relation rather than a new bet on an unproven director.

That behind the camera stable matters given how compress Cudi’s timeline has been. Doe wrap principal photo in nine days on what Cudi has describe as a micro budget, and Wrong Number went into production not long after, with Cudi effective run two sets in overlap windows while still met his oblige as a tour musician and label artist. An early private screen of Doe report drew Robert Pattinson, actor and filmmaker Alex Winter, longtime collab Dot da Genius, and lighting technician Justin Dickson, all of whom praised the film afterward. The pace says something about how seriously Mad Solar is treating this pivot: not as an occasional side interest, but as a second career track being built in real time, film by film, with the same small circle of collaborators carried over from one project to the next.

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Cudi’s path to directing runs through more than a decade of acting work that predates most of his fans’ awareness of it. He played a homosexual character in the 2015 drama James White, took a villain turn in Vincent-N-Roxxy, and joined the ensemble of Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up in 2021, where he performed an original song alongside Ariana Grande. He starred opposite Keanu Reeves in Bill & Ted Face the Music the year before, and took a dramatic recur role in Luca Guadagnino’s HBO miniseries We Are Who We Are. More recently, he appeared in Trap as a character credited only as The Thinker, played a detective in Silent Night, and turned up as an FBI agent in Happy Gilmore 2. He also starred in Ti West’s slasher X, a film Mad Solar helped produce, giving him a direct hand in genre filmmaking well before he ever sat in a director’s chair.

Doe, his actual directorial debut, is a much different film from Wrong Number on its face: an addiction drama shot over a compressed twenty four hour timeline, following an unhoused man drifting through Hollywood, with Cudi writing original songs for the soundtrack alongside starring and directing. Speaking about that first film, Cudi described directing as something he had wanted since childhood, saying he had been “sharpening my sword for years” before finally getting the chance. It is expected to reach audiences sometime in 2027. Wrong Number, arriving so soon after, reads less like a detour from that work and more like Cudi testing a second register almost immediately, trading Doe’s ground level realism for genre mechanics while keeping the same convincer in place behind the camera. The two films sit alongside a music catalog that has kept moving in parallel, include last year’s pop lean album Free and an ongoing comic book series, Moon Man, co-written with Kyle Higgins for Image Comics.

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Neither Doe nor Wrong Number has a confirmed release date as of this writing, though both are expect to reach audiences in 2027 given how far along production is on each. Other report from Deadline did not name a distributor for Wrong Number. Cudi’s schedule beyond these two features is already fill in: he is also credit as composer on the suppose animated feature Slime, a project that keeps his score work active even while he directs his own film for the first time.

What is clear is that Cudi is not treating directing as a single experiment. Two features in overlap production windows, run through the same production company and many of the same producers, point toward a filmmake career being built with the same deliberateness he has historic apply o his music catalog. He rel the pop lean album Free in August 2025 and has said public in the past that he does not know how much longer his record career will continue, which makes the time of this pivot look less like a side quest and more like the start of a second act he has been building the infrastructure for since Mad Solar’s found in 2020.

For now, Wrong Number remains a film in progress, its plot mechanics and eventual cut both still unknown outside the production itself. The only pieces confirm on the record are the ones Cudi and Deadline have already put there: a self-help author, a woman named Eliza, a stalker, and a director who is also standing in front of his own camera for the second time in a year.