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The scariest thing about Backrooms isn’t the infinite labyrinth of vacant, bizarrely uncanny office space that makes up its parallel world – think Severance by way of that Simpsons Treehouse of Horror segment where Homer stumbles into the third dimension – nor the distorted monsters that occupy its glitchy depths. No, no: far scarier is the fact that director Kane Parsons, who makes his feature-film debut with this buzzy A24 horror starring thespian screen legend Chiwetel Ejiofor and Sentimental Value indie darling Renate Reinsve, is 20 years old. By comparison Steven Spielberg, often held up as the poster child of directorial wunderkinds for making Jaws at 27, was basically an unc.
In the movie, Ejiofor plays a depressive alcoholic who owns a failing furniture store, Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire. His only real relationships are with the hot 20-somethings (Shrinking’s Lukita Maxwell and A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms’ Finn Bennett) who help him shoot degrading adverts in which he takes on the store’s cartoonish pirate mascot persona – hobbling around on a peg leg with a fake parrot dangling from his shoulder – and his infomercial-famous therapist (Reinsve). Then, one night, he stumbles upon the titular “backrooms,” falling through an invisible portal in the store’s basement. As you can imagine, jumpscare-laden chaos follows.
For a film predicted to break A24’s domestic record for an opening box office weekend, Backrooms boasts the most fascinating of origin stories. It is based on a cult series of VHS-style found footage YouTube videos which Parsons started uploading in 2022, when he was still a teenager, in turn inspired by Reddit-coded internet horror meme fodder – a phenomenon otherwise known as “creepypasta” – that had circulated for years. The unsettling shorts went viral (to date, the first clip has accrued 78 million views), and within a year, he had been tapped up to make a feature-length adaptation by horror maestro James Wan.
His is just the latest example of YouTube creators parlaying their online virality into Hollywood horror fame. Back in 2022, the Australian twins known as RackaRacka released their debut feature, the gory supernatural romp Talk to Me, and followed it a few years later with the Sally Hawkins-starring Bring Her Back. Both went down like gangbusters with critics and made box-office bank. (They’ve since pivoted to using their government names, Danny and Michael Philippou).
The trend has accelerated tenfold in 2026. Earlier this year, the über popular video game streamer Markiplier – known for his profanity-laden playthroughs of horror games like Five Nights at Freddy’s – funded his own feature debut, Iron Lung, to the tune of $3 million, making more than $50 million in return. (Notably, the film was adapted from one of the many cult horror PC games that he had previously recorded himself playing on YouTube.) And then there’s online sketch comedian Curry Barker, who recently made his multiplex debut with Obsession – having previously made a feature-film exclusively for YouTube – which already looks to be one of the pound-for-pound box office hits of the summer after being made for less than a million dollars.
Not that the emergent YouTuber-to-budding-horror-auteur pipeline should come as much of a surprise. Parsons and the rest of this cohort simply brought the skills they learned on a shoestring budget at home – creativity, frugality, and a DIY can-do attitude – to the big leagues. For these creators, YouTube was just another version of film school. And if their stratospheric success thus far is anything to go by, they’ve only just begun. There are plenty of scares to come – and probably more 20-year-olds, many of whom grew up on extremely online diets of YouTube, Reddit and TikTok, making their horror movie debuts. Now that’s spinechilling.