I’ve always believed horror fans are better talent scouts than Hollywood executives.
We feel it before the market does. There’s something about a shaky hallway, a badly lit room, a strange sound under a bedroom floor, you just know when it has something. Horror fans don’t wait for A24 to put a stamp on it. When I discover a new horror film I send it to the group chat (with other horror nerds I grew up with) at midnight, argue about the story and the shots and the best moments, rewatch the three-second frame nobody else noticed, and collectively, it’s fans like us that turn a cheap little nightmare into something that lives in the culture..
That’s what makes the current YouTube horror moment feel so exciting. It’s not just that a few creators have made successful horror films. YouTube is starting to behave like Hollywood’s most interesting IP lab.
That became even more obvious this month. On 8 June 2026, YouTube published a horror watchlist around Curry Barker, Markiplier and Kane Parsons, explicitly connecting their YouTube-native audiences to theatrical success. The platform also revealed that videos with “Backrooms” in the title generated more than 2 billion views last year, and that Kane Parsons’ Backrooms playlist has pulled almost 200 million views. That’s audience memory being built and compunded over years.
The box office makes the case even more clear. Backrooms, directed by Kane Parsons, has grossed about $220.6 million worldwide, with an $81.4 million domestic opening, according to Box Office Mojo. Parsons is listed as director and co-writer, with A24 distributing. Obsession, from Curry Barker, has reached about $234.5 million worldwide, including $161.2 million domestic, after opening to just $17.2 million in North America. Iron Lung, Markiplier’s self-driven sci-fi horror project, has earned about $51.2 million worldwide against a reported $3 million production budget… roughly 17 times its budget back, according to The Numbers.
For anyone who loves horror, this feels like a really interesting moment. Horror dosn’t suddenly matter… horror has always mattered. It feels like a reminder that some of the most powerful screen ideas don’t arrive through traditional studios and writers rooms. They arrive from obsession, they’re fine tuned through constraints and repetition, and by real fans who feel like they discovered something new, and exciting, and terrifying.
The crucial shift here is that creators are becoming bonafide development pipelines. That’s a pretty significant change in where the power sits.
For years, the entertainment industry treated creators as an opportunity to gain higher reach with fans. Stick them on the red carpet so they can share on their socials. Get them to film a reaction video, and invite them to a junket. Pay them to explain a trailer to the audience a studio couldn’t reach on its own. That model still works to a degree, and it certainly still happens, but the more interesting creator isn’t the person promoting the IP. It’s the person making the IP in a very public way, testing its language with fans, and letting the audience help prove what has real emotional gravity and impact.
And horror is the perfect genre for this shift.
Horror has always worked well with restricted budgets. A tiny budget can help shape the dirty and grimy and sometimes ridiculous aesthetic. Bad lighting can become atmospheric. A cheap location can add to the mythology and the feeling of the horror taking plce in real life. While some genres need spectacle and budget to feel legitimate, horror often gets scarier when it feels handmade and raw and brutal.
That’s where experienced YouTube content creators have a natural advantage. A creator who has spent years making shorts, sketches, analog horror episodes or experimental micro-films isn’t just popular (although that pre-built audience is important). They’ve been training their film making muscle inside of those same constraints. They understand rhythm and tone and storytelling. They understand what makes people pause, comment, theorise, share, rewatch and return. They know when to show too much, when to show nothing, and when to make the viewer feel complicit. They understand all of the key components to make some a great horror film.
Kane Parsons is a great example. Backrooms didn’t arrive as a cold concept. It came with pre-existing emotional texture: yellow walls, humming fluorescent lights, liminal dread, corporate emptiness, internet folklore, analog unease. YouTube describes Parsons as having built a massive following through a photorealistic 3D-animated Backrooms web series, with that viral success bypassing traditional Hollywood pathways before becoming an A24 feature.
Backrooms fandom isn’t passive… the fear is participatory. Fans are actively involved, debating levels, entities, timelines, rules and interpretations. The horror lives in the sense that the world is bigger than any film can fully explain. That’s exactly the kind of lore-density Hollywood usually spends millions trying to manufacture, and where it quite often fails.
Curry Barker’s Obsession shows a different version of the same thing. Barker and Cooper Tomlinson built the “that’s a bad idea” YouTube channel through sketches and micro-budget horror. YouTube notes that Barker’s Milk & Serial, reportedly made for around $800, went viral before his move into Obsession. The remarkable thing about Obsession isn’t just the total money it’s generated, it’s how the run has grown. Bloody Disgusting reported that the film opened to $17 million, then grew to $23 million in its second weekend, $26.4 million in its third, and $25.6 million in its fourth, against a reported $750,000 production budget.
That’s rare, and a perfect example of word-of-mouth being the fandom engine.
Markiplier’s Iron Lung adds a third model: the creator as a self-contained writing and production studio. Markiplier already had years of credibility with horror gaming audiences, and Iron Lung was based on a game world that made complete sense inside his fan history. The Numbers lists the film as released domestically by Markiplier Studios, with a $3 million production budget, an $18.2 million opening weekend and $51.2 million worldwide. YouTube’s own June watchlist describes Markiplier as one of YouTube’s largest gaming creators, with more than 38 million subscribers, and frames his channel as evolving from indie horror Let’s Plays into interactive series and feature filmmaking.
This is where the horror fan in me gets really excited. Because these successes weren’t built on polished productions and large marketing budgets. They were built on trust and community.
Fans didn’t show up for these films because an algorithm decided to show them a trailer and sell them tickets. They showed up because they already had a relationship with the creator’s content and taste. They knew the cadence, and the obsessions and they knew the kind of dread being promised. That’s real creative intimacy.
Hollywood has always chased awareness, while fandom is built on recognition.
This moment is bigger than these three films. We’ve seen the early shape of it before. Talk to Me, from Danny and Michael Philippou of RackaRacka, took YouTube-native chaos, physicality and shock timing into A24 horror, then grossed about $92 million worldwide on a reported $4.25 million production budget. The directors came from a YouTube culture of stunts, fights and high-energy filmmaking, and the film translated that grammar into possession horror with real emotional weight.
Skinamarink showed the micro-budget end of the spectrum. Kyle Edward Ball had been making nightmare-inspired videos online before turning that sensibility into a feature. Time reported that Skinamarink was made for $15,000, shot in Ball’s childhood home, leaked online after festival play, then became a viral horror talking point before its theatrical run. It’s success is revealing…. A film whose audience was trained by online horror language to find terror in barely visible corners, ugly textures and the feeling of being too small in a dark house.
Five Nights at Freddy’s isn’t a YouTube-filmmaker case, but it’s crucial to the wider signal. The IP began as a game, but its fandom was supercharged by creator culture: Let’s Plays, theory videos, lore explainers, fan art, memes and younger audiences treating horror as a puzzle box. The 2023 film grossed about $291.6 million worldwide with an $80 million domestic opening. Vulture’s reporting on Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 in December 2025 captured the strategy perfectly: Blumhouse leaned into the superfandom rather than sanding it down for everyone, with references and in-jokes designed for fans already living across Discord, Reddit, Twitch, TikTok and Instagram.
Unfinishedness is another valuable signal, because horror fans love a gap. A missing tape, a rule half-explained by someone who definitely didn’t survive long enough to finish the sentence. YouTube is built for that kind of incompletion, a short can end before the answer is revealed, a comment section can become part of the mythology, a fan theory can keep something alive. The format thrives on those loose ends.
That’s why Backrooms is so potent. It’s not only a story, it’s an architecture that is made for fans to speculate and discuss. The world can be endlessly extended by creators, fans, game-makers and studios. GamesRadar reported that the success of A24’s Backrooms gave a player bump to co-op horror games inspired by the same internet mythos, with Backrooms: Escape Together hitting nearly 9,000 concurrent players on SteamDB and Escape the Backrooms seeing daily peaks around 16,000 after the film’s release.
The commercial logic is obvious, but the emotional logic is more important.
Horror is one of the few genres where fans actively enjoy feeling ahead of the mainstream. There’s real social capital in discovering the cursed video, the tiny film, the creator tht nobody’s heard of yet, the short that feels wrong and disturbing in a way you can’t explain. The cinema ticket then becomes a kind of proof, saying that I was here when this thing crossed over into the mainstream. I knew before it became popular.
That creates a powerful bridge between niche and mass culture. Deloitte’s 2026 Digital Media Trends research found that more than half of fans engage with favourite shows, artists or franchises across multiple platforms, rising to roughly 70% among Gen Z and millennial fans. It also found that 52% of fans discover new content primarily through social media, rising to 73% among Gen Z fans. YouTube horror sits directly inside that behaviour.
Discovery, fandom, interpretation, creator trust and purchase intent all happening before the actual ‘official’ campaign even starts.
This doesn’t mean every creator with a big audience should be handed a theatrical release though.
That’s the lazy and shortsighted way of looking at things… but unfortunately Hollywood loves a lazy read when money appears. Business Insider’s recent creator-film analysis makes the caution very clear: industry executives see an opportunity, especially in horror and comedy, but follower count alone doesn’t guarantee a box-office win. Range Media’s Kai Gayoso told the publication that storytelling ability matters more than popularity, while the piece also noted pretty poor theatrical results from some creator-led projects.
A subscriber count doesn’t mean you can write a good screenplay. A meme doesnt mean you can create a movie. Horror fans can smell cynicism and a quick cash grab through a locked basement door.
The creators breaking through right now aren’t just famous. They have a point of view, and real talent for storytelling. Parsons understands liminal unease. Barker understands escalation and dread inside everyday social awkwardness. Markiplier understands gamer anxiety, bodily claustrophobia and the trust between performer and audience. The Philippous understand impact, possession, peer pressure and grief. Ball understands childhood fear as a visual language.
It’s not about who has fans… it’s about who has built a world fans want to keep entering.
For studios, the opportunity is enormous, but it requires humility. The job isn’t to colonise YouTube horror and drag it into a franchise machine. The job is to recognise where creator-native horror has already developed emotional infrastructure: audience memory, lore behaviour, visual codes, participatory rituals and a creator voice people trust.
Hollywood keeps saying it wants original IP. Horror fans keep showing it where to look.
The point for brands and entertainment companies is that fandom doesn’t begin at the launch of a film. It begins much earlier, in uploads and comments and in fan theories formed early. The messy, unfiltered content from creators making work before anyone gives them permission. The audience is watching the development process, judging the voice, investing in the lore, and deciding whether the creator has earned the right to scare them with a much bigger production.
The next great horror franchise may begin with a five-minute video that makes someone pause at 1:13, rewind twice, send it to three friends, and spend the next hour in the comments trying to work out what they just saw.
As a horror fan, that feels exactly how it should be. The genre has always belonged to the people making something terrifying out of almost nothing.
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About Calvin Innes
Calvin Innes is a Fandom & Pop Culture Creative Strategist and Consultant. He is the person brands call when they want to understand, and connect with culture. 25+ years experience working with global brands, agencies and organisations. Clients including Sony, HBO, Adidas, Unilever and Pokémon. Available for consulting, pitch support, workshops and keynotes. calvininnes.com
