The first Star Wars movie in seven years just came out, but moviegoers are more excited about a pair of recent horror movies, “Backrooms” and “Obsession,” than a galaxy far, far away.
They’re both of the horror genre, although slightly different flavors. “Obsession” follows a young man whose wish that his crush would fall in love with him goes horribly wrong. “Backrooms” traps its characters in a surreal, horrifyingly banal interdimensional space. But they both struck box office gold. Perhaps most notably, however, both were made by 20-something-year-old YouTubers.
With the two movies, Kane Parsons of “Backrooms’ and Curry Barker of “Obsession” secured their first shot at movies backed by Hollywood studios, and are part of a growing group of such creators who are being embraced by Hollywood. Major film studios seem to be turning to a new generation of filmmakers who speak to a new generation of filmgoers. It could be the future of movies, experts said. But why?
This surge of talent from YouTube is a “natural progression” of where movies and the internet have been headed in recent years, said Steve Granelli, teaching professor of communication studies at Northeastern University. YouTube has minted its own stars, like Mr. Beast, outside of Hollywood. But as they look to get people back into theaters after the COVID-19 pandemic, studios are starting to see a new pipeline for talent that clearly appeals to a mass audience, Granelli said. These YouTubers tend to have a preexisting audience of thousands or even millions of fans ready to buy tickets.
“Hollywood is doing their due diligence by going to them because they look at the numbers,” said Dennis Staroselsky, an assistant teaching professor of theater at Northeastern and a working actor.
YouTube has long been a place where people could make their own movies on their own terms with few resources but a massive potential audience that can access their work with the click of a button. On YouTube, Parsons and Barker have millions of subscribers and create videos that reach as many as 15 million people.
“It makes sense to me that we’re getting to this point where the freedom that a lot of storytellers had on YouTube without getting a distribution engine behind them allowed them, even at an early age, to find a voice that could resonate with an audience,” Granelli said.
Despite their age, YouTubers like Parsons, 20, and Barker, 26, are taking on their first studio gigs with years of experience directing and releasing content to an audience and getting a sense of what people do and don’t connect with. That last part is key, Granelli said. By the time they get behind a camera on their first Hollywood set, they have a defined style that’s been informed by years of direct feedback.
The investments have paid off.
Parsons became the youngest director to ever have a movie hit number one at the box office. Barker’s “Obsession” became the first movie of the modern era to earn more money in its second weekend. The success of both films was also overwhelmingly driven by young filmgoers, according to film industry research service PostTrak.
It might be a strong argument against the idea that younger generations are ditching theaters for streaming.
“Since COVID, there’s been this lethargic feeling around theatrical — is it relevant anymore, and is it going to survive?” said Jason Blum, the head of horror-focused production company Blumhouse, during a recent producers conference. Blum helped produce both “Backrooms” and “Obsession.” “To me, there’s almost this feeling of the ’70s, of this new generation of young people who are making edgy movies that are connecting in theaters in a crazy way.”
Blum’s comparison to the New Hollywood movement of the 1960s and 1970s is apt, said Tomas Elliott, a film historian and assistant professor of English at Northeastern University London.
During that time, a generation of new filmmakers, like Martin Scorsese, George Lucas, Stephen Spielberg, Brian De Palma and Francis Ford Coppola, entered and reinvigorated the studio system, Elliott said. They brought new sensibilities and influences that spoke to a younger generation’s countercultural ideas.
“You could totally see the shift that comes in as this, in some ways experimental but in other ways more bottom-up, kind of filmmaking … started to have this influence on Hollywood filmmaking,” Elliott said. “Then those Hollywood studios sort of bought into that project and bought them up.”
The YouTubers sparking a new wave of horror are bringing their own touchstones and styles that speak to a younger audience. Parsons admitted as much to the New York Times, claiming he doesn’t watch a lot of movies and is shaped more by video games and web series.
The key difference with this class of up-and-coming directors is that they are almost exclusively making horror films. That’s not a coincidence.
“Horror has always been the genre that has been most accessible to that pipeline [of talent],” Staroselsky said.
The genre involves lower budgets, bigger returns for studios and more freedom for filmmakers to take risks with their creative choices and more opportunity for studios to take risks on the filmmakers they select, Staroselsky explained.
But the success of “Backrooms” and “Obsession” is about much more than studios finding another way to make money. Granelli said it’s an encouraging sign, for the industry and creatives, that people still get something out of the collective theatergoing experience.
“These are examples of movies where people [say], ‘You need to go see this in the theater with other people,” Granelli said. “I love that for this generation of creators because they were putting things out that were not going to be seen by a lot of people all at once. Now they get that chance.
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