After ‘Obsession’ and ‘Backrooms’ made history, here are the talents on deck to make the jump from YouTube views to theatrical grosses.
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Do you hear that sound? That is the collective hum of assistant keyboards trawling Reddit and YouTube at the behest of their bosses, who are looking for the next big thing in the horror space.
The YouTube-to-horror feature filmmaker pipeline has been proving particularly profitable over the past couple of weeks. Curry Barker’s Obsession sits at $111 million-plus in its third week of release, while the Kane Parson-directed Backrooms has also crossed $100 million domestically.
Barker and Parsons are the latest directors to have blown up after cutting their teeth with an internet audience. Before them, it was the Philippou brothers who parlayed online notoriety into a feature debut, Talk to Me, that landed at A24 after a Sundance Film Festival debut and quickly begat a sequel. Long before them, there was David Sandberg, who released horror short films online under the name ponysmasher before landing a feature deal for his film Lights Out.
While horror directors have long had a reputation for stretching a dollar and finding creative solutions to filmmaking problems, the directors coming out of YouTube are seen as being able to do so on an even smaller scale, all while capturing the attention of the easily distracted Gen Z masses.
As the genre continues to be reliably bankable for both the major studios and specialty outfits, there has been a land grab for the next stars in the space. The Hollywood Reporter called insiders to see who could be on deck.
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Dylan Clark
Image Credit: Screenshot/YouTube Clark posts his high-concept, low-budget horror short films to YouTube, earning millions of views and a loyal following (as well as some Hollywood attention). His most popular short, Portrait of God, has over 10 million views and earned the attention of horror heavy hitters Jordan Peele and Sam Raimi, who are now attached to produce the feature film version of the story for Universal. He has also been tapped to direct a Blair Witch Project reboot, set up at Lionsgate.
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Nicolas Curcio
Image Credit: Gilbert Flores/Variety/Getty Images Sometimes, just being a good hang can get you far. GOAT writer Curcio hasn’t focused on horror shorts, but instead has gotten to know the players in the genre with his podcast Hollywood Hang, which boasts guests including Weapons producer Roy Lee. In addition to the podcast, which he hosts with Kristen Tepper, he’s built a TikTok following of 140,000, where he dishes out storytelling advice. That’s all been enough to help him get his first feature off the ground, Play House, which he directs for M3GAN producers Divide/Conquer.
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Sam Evenson
Image Credit: Allen Berezovsky/Getty Images Evenson is behind the YouTube channel Grimoire Horror (196,000 subscribers), where he periodically debuts short films that earn millions of views. The filmmaker, who has also worked as a VFX artist with credits on Dune: Part Two and The Last of Us, was recently tapped by Neon, the indie studio behind Longlegs, to make his feature directorial debut. Evenson will direct the project based on his short film, Mora, about an artist who uses an AI model corrupted by dark web images and becomes haunted by a mysterious woman. Roy Lee, the uber horror producer behind Weapons, and Steven Schneider (Late Night with the Devil) are among the producers.
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Spencer Lackey
Image Credit: Jason Mendez/Getty Images With over 6 million followers across Instagram and TikTok, and nearly 600,000 subscribers on YouTube, Lackey has built his following with ingenious horror short-form content. Lackey stars in his own content and many of his videos have a humorous bent (see: monsters that watch unsuspecting victims do laundry). Lackey told Dread Central last year, ”Industry folks are starting to take digital creators more seriously. Sure, there’s a difference between making a TikTok and making a feature, but a lot of the same creative muscles are being exercised.”
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Caleb Phillips
Image Credit: Robby Klein/Getty Images Phillips first landed attention with his 2018 short Other Side of the Box, which amassed more than 30 million views on YouTube and centered on a couple who is gifted a mysterious box — to creepy and disastrous results, and followed it up with the mind-bending Play Me (1.4 million views). In March, he screened his genre-bending feature Imposters at South by Southwest, and has capitalized on the Jessica Rothe starrer by signing with Underground, the management company that is home to Obsession filmmaker Curry Barker.
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Heidi Wong
Image Credit: Maya Dehlin Spach/Getty Images She’s a horror content creator who developed her audience with a mix of movie reviews, original videos based on creepy internet stories and self-produced scary content. Wong has 1.8 million Instagram followers and nearly two million YouTube subscribers, but it’s on TikTok where Wong has earned her biggest following, 6 million strong. She posts deceptively simple videos (most are text with reaction shots) under her series “A Heidi Wong Horror Story” that earn millions of views. While she already gets tapped by studios to help promote their biggest genre projects, from Stranger Things to the Scream movies, Wong has long expressed her filmmaking aspirations.
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