Not the next big thing, the now big thing: The YouTuber takeover of horror movies with Obsession, Backrooms

When the clock ticked over to the new millennium, and planes didn’t fall out of the sky, Curry Barker had no sense of the collective sigh of relief.

At the time, he was barely three months old.

In September, Barker was 25-years-old and debuting his first cinema feature movie at the Toronto Film Festival. The crowd didn’t wait for the end of the screening for horror flick Obsession to show their appreciation, they started chanting his name before the film.

By the end of the festival, Barker had secured not only a reported $US15 million ($21m) deal out of a competitive bidding process for the rights to Obsession, but had also nabbed financing for his next script, Anything But Ghosts. He’s also been nabbed by A24 to write and direct a Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake.

Before this past year, Barker had been a YouTuber who had gained notice for his comedy sketches and a 62-minute found footage online movie, Milk & Serial, that he had made for $US800 and has generated 2.7 million views. Another horror short’s, The Chair, counter is at 9.7 million.

That’s how that Toronto crowd knew his name. That’s also why all those Hollywood power players, including producers Jason Blum and Roy Lee, were betting big on the Alabaman native.

YouTubers are not the next big thing. They are the now big thing.

Obsession, which cost under $US1 million, opened in cinemas around the world two weekends ago and has taken over the cultural zeitgeist.

You’ll have seen the memes and the social media reports of cinemagoers so scared they ran away, or even thinkpieces about how Obsession mines entitlement culture.

Obsession’s premise is deceptively simple, and a riff on the monkey’s paw cautionary tale. It’s centred on a young man who makes a wish on a cursed toy that his childhood friend Nikki would love him more than anyone else in the world. Extremities ensue.

Here are some numbers that almost never happens: Obsession opened in the US and Canada at $US17 million, well above expectations, and then the following weekend, its ticket sales actually went up to $US23.9 million.

In Australia, its opening weekend gross was $809,000 with a screen average of $5220. The next weekend, it doubled to $1.62 million with a screen average of $9909.

The trajectory of the box office in 99 per cent of cases is downward, especially for genre films such as horror that have a baked-in fanbase who tend to be enthusiastic about showing up that first weekend. That’s what the industry means when it says something is “front-loaded”.

Typically, a blockbuster will see a 50 per cent drop from weekend one to weekend two, and that’s nothing for alarm. A 40 per cent increase in the US is a record for a wide-release movie outside of Christmas. Those Australian numbers are a 100 per cent uplift.

The word-of-mouth, online and off, have been stellar and the audiences are young – in North America, where they do a version of exit polling of cinemas, 75 per cent of ticket buyers are in the 18 to 34 demographic bracket.

The critics are even on board – Obsession is certified fresh on Rotten Tomatoes with a score of 96 per cent.

“I was so impressed with Obsession,” established horror director Zach Creggar (Weapons, Barbarian) told Barker during a one-on-one for Interview magazine. “I thought it was really, really special. I never ever really get scared watching movies. It’s such a thrill to feel actual fear when you’re watching a movie. I crave it so much.”

Audiences and the industry are obsessed with Obsession, Barker, and his peers. He’s not alone.

These new generation horror auteurs are tapped into youth culture because so much of it is happening online, and that’s where they are too, and they’re able to start off on their terms and gain a following before pushing on Hollywood’s door.

Only one generation ago, the pathway for aspiring young American filmmakers followed a more traditional path. There was film school or you made indie movies with your creative circle and tried to get into a festival where you hope someone with a chequebook and a contact list will take notice.

That’s how the likes of Kevin Smith with Clerks and Richard Linklater with Slackers broke through in their 20s.

Lena Dunham, whose memoirs Famesick last month debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list, uploaded early shorts onto YouTube in the platforms nascent years.

But she didn’t make any noise until her second independent feature, Tiny Furniture, was accepted into South by Southwest, and was then seen by Judd Apatow.

It’s no accident that Barker and his cohort coming up through YouTube are working in horror, a genre that skews towards young people. According to ad sales house Val Morgan, in 2025, 68 per cent of horror audiences were aged between 18 and 39, up from 58 per cent a year earlier.

Cinema movies have had a difficult time rebounding since the COVID pandemic but the horror genre has been one of the more reliable segments, especially when it comes to attracting gen Z and gen Y viewers.

That younger cohort, the Z-ers, in particular had been thought to be lost to TikTok, YouTube and other online video platforms, but it seems the key is to get them to follow their favourite creators offline to a cinema.

This weekend is premiere of another YouTube sensation’s feature debut, Backrooms, by Kane Parsons, who at 20 years old, is even younger than Barker.

Backrooms has its origins in a creepypasta — internet slang for a digital urban legend that is shared online — stemming from a photo uploaded to 4chan in 2019. It showed a relatively non-descript backroom of hobby store with yellow wallpaper, ceiling tiles, fluorescent lighting and institutional carpet.

Parsons was 16 years old in 2022 when he started making YouTube shorts of Backrooms, co-opting the aesthetic as a extradimensional liminal space that mirrors and morphs our reality.

Within a year, Parsons had been tapped by an amalgam of production companies and studio A24 to turn his web series into a feature film.

Starring Oscar nominees Chiwetel Ejiofor (12 Years a Slave) and Renate Reinsve (Sentimental Value), Backrooms is expected to open above $US45 million in the US. The movie’s production budget was under $US10 million.

Hollywood loves nothing more than low investment and high returns — and Obsession is already close to 1:100.

There is also YouTuber Markiplier, legal name Mark Edward Fischback, who garnered a big following on YouTube for his “Let’s Play” videos in which viewers watched him make his way through horror video games. He has close to 40 million subscribers.

Markiplier chose to adapt Iron Lung, a 2022 indie game he had played to his audience, in part because of the logistics of its single-location made it cheaper to film. He has said he wanted to make a theatrical release because it would help normalise the idea of a YouTuber expanding their horizons.

He made it for under $US3 million but couldn’t get a studio to take on distribution — they weren’t taking him seriously, a regretful decision surely — so did it independently, directing dealing with exhibitors.

He also activated his millions of loyal fans, encouraging them to call their local cinemas and demand they schedule it into their program.

Iron Lung ended up grossing $US50 million worldwide.

Horror movies loves a good origin story, and the current wave of YouTube to the big screen starts closer to home in Australia.

Danny and Michael Philippou, 33, are twin brothers from Adelaide and spent almost a decade building a following on YouTube on their channel RackaRacka, which now has 6.9 million subscribers, with raucous pranks and stunts. Their videos clocked up more than a billion views.

In their early 20s, they both worked as crew on the acclaimed Australian horror The Babadook, and inspired by the likes of The Exorcist, Memories of Murder and Let the Right One In, they set out to make their own feature.

The experience gained from their YouTube years would be useful because they were used to working creatively and boldly, and with not a lot of money.

Their first feature, Talk to Me, was made for $US4 billion, and premiered at the Adelaide Film Festival in 2022, and after it played at Sundance the following year, it sparked a bidding war, which was ultimately won by A24.

The film went on to gross $US92 million, won critical acclaim (94 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes), a bunch of awards (including eight AACTA gongs), rocketed star Sophie Wilde’s career, and scared the bejesus out of viewer who went near it.

The Philippous followed it up in 2025 with Bring Her Back, and is at or near the top of the list of exciting Australian filmmakers with an international presence working today.

Certainly anyone talking about horror movies of the 2020s, and especially from the YouTuber vanguard, will mention the twins.

They were the first of this wave, but they aren’t the last. It’s increasingly become a legitimate pathway to go from YouTube to the big screen, especially for horror auteurs connected to that desired young audience.

Danny Philippou told Deadline at the time of Talk to Me’s release, “Even George Miller told us he’d (have been) on YouTube if it was available to him”.