Jasmine Cephas Jones
Overview
Monstrous creatures leap from a magical storybook and unleash mayhem and mischief for Auntie Opal and her tween niece Nina in this spooky short film.
Cast
Reviews
4 min readThe Book That Bit Back
I keep thinking about the moment the pages start to move. Not like a breeze through an open window—more like something breathing beneath the paper, slow and deliberate. That’s the first real jolt in Erax, Hebru Brantley’s 13-minute short film, and it’s the kind of image that lingers precisely because it doesn’t overstay its welcome.
In a runtime shorter than most TikTok scroll sessions, Brantley—best known for his vibrant Afrofuturist murals and sculptures—attempts something riskier than a mere genre exercise. He tries to make a fairy tale feel dangerous again.
The setup is deceptively simple: Auntie Opal (Jasmine Cephas Jones) reads a bedtime story to her niece Nina (Genesis White), and the creatures from the book—monstrous, mischievous things—leap into their living room. What follows isn’t so much a battle as a negotiation. The film’s tension comes from watching two Black women, one adult and one on the cusp of adolescence, navigate a space that’s suddenly alive with something otherworldly.
There’s no grand villain here, no final boss to defeat. Instead, there’s a sense of unease that feels almost domestic, like discovering your reflection doesn’t quite match your movements.
That unease is where Erax gets interesting. The film is classified as Family and Mystery on TMDB, but the Thriller tag from SensCritique feels more accurate. This isn’t the sanitized spookiness of a Halloween special; it’s closer to the uncanny dread of Coraline or The Witches, where the real horror isn’t the monsters themselves but the way they expose the cracks in the world we thought we knew.
Buzz & Rumors
Public reportsHe wanted puppets with his daughter. Netflix handed him Henson.
Hebru Brantley pitched three ideas when Netflix's Emerging Filmmaker Initiative came calling. The last one was a lockdown project he had meant to make himself, with his daughter, using puppets. "Something to do during the pandemic," he told the Los Angeles Times. latestnetflix.com's view is that that sketch became Erax, a 13-minute creature short that premiered globally on 17 February 2022.Jim Henson's Creature Shop built the beasts. Practical work and VFX share the frame. Jasmine Cephas Jones plays flighty Auntie Opal. Genesis White is niece Nina. Lance Gross is in the cast. Henry G.M. Jones co-wrote. 
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Chicago already knew Brantley for Flyboy and Lil Mama, characters collectors chase. He had studied film before the gallery years. The Times framed Erax as his jump into studio-scale live action, a modern fable about a clever girl, her aunt, and a book that should have stayed shut. Rotten Tomatoes logs the logline in one breath. Monstrous creatures leap from a magical storybook and unleash mayhem on Opal and Nina. IMDb adds the sleepover accident. They have to put the Erax back in the book. , , 
Five days in Altadena. Sonnenfeld in post.
Brantley shot over five days in summer 2021 in Altadena. He joked that the program felt like film school multiplied by 1,000, because the calendar was fast. "It gives you a sense of what that real film world is going to be like," he said. "You don't feel like they just threw you into the deep end and said, 'You figure it out.'" Barry Sonnenfeld, then a fan of Brantley's art and a veteran of Netflix's A Series of Unfortunate Events, mentored him through post. Sonnenfeld called action-adventure-comedy the hardest mix and said Brantley pulled it off "quite nicely." Then he went further. "I think he could direct any big-budget film he wanted to."
Netflix would not discuss budget. Ian Bricke, vice president of independent film, said the annual program was built to find people who will make commercial movies "of all shapes and sizes." The first wave also included Ashley Eakin's Forgive Us Our Trespasses and Marielle Woods's Heart Shot. All three dropped the same day. Brantley described the tone as a question. What if Dr. Seuss was a bad guy?
Cold open, not a buried footnote
The Times quotes him on the next step. He sees Erax as a possible cold open for a full-length film. His company Angry Hero was already developing a Flyboy adaptation and other work. The representation pitch is blunt. He wants creature features set in places that look like where he grew up, with people of color who feel closer than the monster movies of his childhood. That is the ambition on the record, not a rumor of a secret franchise announcement.
Netflix still sells the short as a kids-and-family mystery. Runtime listings disagree by a minute. Rotten Tomatoes says 13. TMDB says 14. Either way it is a proof of concept with a Henson shop and a Men in Black director in the notes, not a stray 13-minute listing with no production story. Early notices from LeisureByte and But Why Tho? liked the practical creatures and the 1980s flavor. The real gossip is the origin. A father-daughter puppet plan became a Netflix EFI short with studio muscle, then Brantley said he wanted the feature. , ,
Entertainment rumors and trivia aggregated from public reporting. Treat speculation as unverified unless a cited source confirms it.