The kids are alright

A wave of YouTuber-turned box-office-record-breaking horror auteurs have Hollywood nervous and rethinking the filmmaking playbook

- Kibo Ngowi

Two of the biggest movies in the world right now were made by guys in their twenties who started their careers on YouTube.

As of this writing, Backrooms has made $117 million (about R1.9 billion) in just four days since its international release. Sitting right below it at the box office is Obsession, which has taken in $151m since it came out on May 15.

But the thing that’s most striking about the movies is how much they're making relative to their budgets.

Backrooms was made on a budget of $10m and Obsession $750,000. That means Obsession has made more than 200 times its budget back. Its momentum is showing no signs of slowing down. All the while Obsession writer-director Curry Barker is 26 years old and Backrooms director Kane Parsons 20.

Hollywood has long operated on the assumption that the path to the director’s chair runs through film school, short film festivals and years of grinding through the industry’s lower ranks.

But the internet has quietly been building a parallel pipeline where a teenager with a camera, editing software and a YouTube account can amass an audience of millions and develop a filmmaking voice that rivals anything coming out of the traditional system. And now, that pipeline is starting to empty directly into the multiplex.

Known online as Kane Pixels, Parsons began publishing the viral web series Backrooms to his YouTube channel in 2022, based on the creepypasta (horror-related legend) of the same name.

Parsons uploaded a short animation on his YouTube channel on January 7, 2022, under the name The Backrooms (Found Footage). The video grew in popularity and now has more than 80 million views.

Before the upload, Parsons intended the short film to be a standalone work and had an unrelated story he had developed some time before. While the story’s themes were somewhat connected to that first short, he didn’t think it would be popular.