The MTV-to-Hollywood boom has a modern counterpart: YouTube to horror

Now, though, a much more promising route—especially for horror directors—is making movies directly for YouTube, which has its own audience ready for the next video to autoplay. This isn’t a new pipeline: Filmmakers have long parlayed the assured effectiveness of their no-budget short creations into studio trust, and older directors like David F. Sandberg and Dan Trachtenberg have previously used YouTube as proving grounds for their demonstrations of VFX, inventive lighting, and creative frugality. But this pipeline is also an increasingly viable one, where audiences can be built and personal styles can be platformed, all while finding the best way to speak to an audience that, more and more, is crossing over from the internet to the multiplex.

Some of that platform-specific appeal is visual and thematic. The best elements of Backrooms grow directly from the assured intangible aesthetic that Kane Parsons displayed right out of the gate on his YouTube channel, focusing on an accidental in-between realm inspired by no-clipping through the walls of digital worlds. There are reasons why that idea resonates with a certain crowd, but the practical foundations of it are inherently born from spending the day falling into a computer screen.

The similarly self-taught Philippou twins, a.k.a. RackaRacka, honed their signature nasty effects on a small scale while testing what would best freak out a broad viewership. It’s here, in the realm of shock and surprise, that this crop of YouTubers explicitly shows the rhythmic connection between horror and humor—it’s no coincidence that so many of these YouTube filmmakers were pranksters and comics, infusing their sketches with horror or their frights with punchlines. The better the gag, whether that’s a jump scare or a laugh line, the likelier someone who jumped or laughed will share it with their friends or spread it on social media. That approach means that these films often have at least one or two standout sequences or images that inspire the same kind of word-of-mouth evangelizing from its audience members. Think about the table-munching in Bring Her Back or the bathroom sex in Together—these aren’t set pieces per se, but titillating moments straddling the funny and the messed-up, begging for you to commiserate about them with others.

The poster child for this is Obsession. Despite his film’s unexpectedly explosive popularity, director Curry Barker didn’t emerge from a vacuum. He’d already released his found-footage feature debut, Milk & Serial, on YouTube after years of sketch comedy. His simple, brutal, uncomfortably funny sophomore film compiled scene after scene of dark doubling-downs on a queasy premise. Not to give the Golden Globes oxygen, but just look at Focus Features’ submission of Obsession as a comedy for those awards—this is partially due to Barker’s comfort with clever punchiness over sustained dread, the former being far more advantageous to an online filmmaker.

Putting his online training to use in a different way, Markiplier ran his one-man horror show Iron Lung with the confidence of a star who’s been streaming for more than a decade. This is someone very comfortable with his facial reactions being the focal point for an audience, regardless of the horrific happenings surrounding them. He also, as a filmmaker coming from the world of Let’s Plays, incorporated plenty of game-specific details and nuances into his DIY adaptation, which imbued the Lovecraftian film with a modern flair that also read as authentic to his audience. In a related, detrimental way, YouTube film critic Chris Stuckmann’s Shelby Oaks was overly assembled from references to other horror movies—an occupational hazard far less conducive to effective filmmaking.

This new wave of online-first filmmakers echoes the MTV-to-Hollywood boom in ways both artistically pure and purely cynical. Stylish variations on classical techniques—and some wrinkles unique to the technology they grew up on—helped get these filmmakers noticed by audiences, even if subscriber counts and viewership numbers were what was getting them in the door to pitch their features. They might not have been proving that they play nice with corporate dough and slick L.A. crews, like the music video crowd, but they still had enough data to let the moneymen rest easy knowing that, for some reason, the kids thought that these filmmakers had something special. Now that, in 2026 at least, this has been proven right beyond a shadow of a doubt—with Obsession and Backrooms making staggering amounts of money, while Iron Lung turned an absurd profit—it seems certain that digging through YouTube search results for the next big thing will become common wisdom.