So young and already so profitable! The reporting on the horror hits of the last few weeks is full of superlatives. “Obsession,” it says, only cost $750,000, but grossed $300 million worldwide. The 26-year-old director Curry Barker also achieved the rare feat of achieving even more sales in the following weeks than on the opening weekend.
“Backrooms”, another recent horror blockbuster from a youngster, made two hundred and fifty times its budget at the box office. Kane Parsons, 21, is the youngest filmmaker to reach number one in the US box office charts. “Iron Lung” “only” came in at $50 million, but its creator raised the three it cost on his own. As a 37-year-old, Mark Fischbach breaks away from the blood boy pattern, but he can also score points with a record: as much blood as in his sci-fi fever dream has apparently never flowed on the screen, over 360,000 liters.
But what else unites these cinema newcomers other than the fact that they cause a sensation with their considerable “returns on investments”? They are YouTubers. So they are building their careers on this video platform, which now even overshadows the viewership of streaming giants.
Barker, Parsons and Fischbach delight millions on their channels, “That’sa bad idea”, “KanePixels” and “Markiplier”, with quick comedy sketches, short films and video game content. The fact that her screen debuts have now shot through the roof so much is probably also due to this following. Fan engagement means free marketing from influencers with a wide reach, including a bonus of trust among your peers.
Striking: “Obsession,” “Backrooms” and “Iron Lung” are all horror films. The audience for this genre is largely made up of teenagers and twenty-somethings. More than half of the US audience for these films should been under 25. An established fan base that also has an affinity for horror: “A match made in movie heaven.”
Should that be it? Horror in particular has long been considered a prime example of how much can be achieved with little, so that the YouTube connection seems almost just a nice side phenomenon. Before YouTube, i.e. before 2005, the box office hit “The Blair Witch Project” (also thanks to a sophisticated campaign on the early Internet), the torture show “Saw” and the surveillance camera ghost horror “Paranormal Activity” made Hollywood’s profit hearts beat faster.
Even the fact that YouTubers succeed with terrible things in the cinema is not unheard of: it was only in 2022 that Danny and Michael Phillipou, whose channel “RackkaRackka” has seven million subscribers, climbed to the cinema Olympus with “Talk to Me”. And the ideas from this whole new generation of filmmakers? “Backrooms” alone offers something really new. The plot is based on an often shared and varied meme: an image of an empty, beige room accompanied by text describing how terrible it must be to be trapped in that monochrome monotony.
Significant, as it is also about being locked up. In “Obsession” the protagonist uses magic to transform his crush into his superfan – the result is hopeless relationship terror. “Iron Lung” follows a convict who has to explore the bottom of an ocean of blood in the smallest of submarine spaces. Not for claustrophobics!
Isolation and deprivation of liberty: This is based on the experiences of a target group that was locked up during Covid times. A fertile ground for the rise of many YouTubers who were able to rely on the undivided attention of children and young people during the exit restrictions.
The urge to break out that these three films promote also reads as an allegory of the desire to escape the YouTube silo. The platform is a competitor to Hollywood, but also an alternative tube system (YouTube means something like you tube) that can increasingly lead directly into the established system. At the price of losing independence and creative freedom? In the spirit of “Obsession”: Be careful what you wish for!
The young creators’ successful escape obviously also has something to do with their skills, which they have spent years optimizing online. Because they can always stage things skilfully. Too skillful? There was a brief rumor that “Backrooms” was actually directed by a veteran professional director and that Studio A24 just wanted to adorn itself with the laurels of a popular YouTuber.
That alone signals that the origins of these filmmakers’ debuts are hard to tell. It seems they have now gotten rid of the amateur stigma. So advanced Googles YouTube from a video to a talent search engine. It is questionable whether this phenomenon is just a fad or an actual structural change in business (keyword “democratization”). But one thing is certain: we can continue to look into the tube with excitement. And onto the screens.
Focus: What lies ahead for us?
It’s been 30 years since diepresse.com went online, “Die Presse” took the step into the digital age. We are taking this anniversary as an opportunity to look forward again. Young entrepreneurs, researchers, artists and politicians are asking themselves the big questions of our time: How will our most important areas of life change in the next few decades? How will we work, believe and love? And what else do we need to know in the future?
To the focus.
