Horror Is Having Its Best Month in Years, and It's Thanks to YouTube
Okay I need to talk about this because it's honestly kind of insane. Right now, in theaters, the two biggest horror movies out are Backrooms and Obsession, and both of them were directed by guys who got their start making videos on YouTube. I already mentioned Backrooms a while back when it was just a movie in the works, but now that it's actually out, I had to go see it for myself. And the timing with Obsession blowing up too is just too good not to talk about.
Not gonna get into the plot. The less you know walking in, the better. If you've seen those creepy yellow room images online, you've got the vibe, but the movie takes that idea way further than you'd expect, leaning hard into the same atmosphere over plot approach that made the original videos so unsettling in the first place.
Visually it's just so good. The rooms and hallways feel like they were designed by someone who's never seen a normal building. Everything is bathed in this sickly fluorescent yellow, and somehow that's scarier than total darkness. Empty rooms have never felt this dangerous.
The sound is doing a lot of quiet work too. No jump scare stingers, just this low hum sitting under everything the whole time. You don't realize how tense you are until someone speaks and your whole body reacts. What's crazy is Kane Parsons co-composed the score himself, and you can tell, the music feels so locked into the visuals that it's basically one of the pillars holding the whole movie up.
Now here's the part that's genuinely wild. I touched on Parsons being the youngest director A24 has worked with before, but seeing that actually pay off this big is another thing entirely. He's 20 years old, started as Kane Pixels on YouTube, and now he's got the number one movie in the country.
Curry Barker has a similar story behind Obsession. He grew up in Mobile, Alabama, moved to LA at 18, and started a sketch comedy channel called "that's a bad idea" with his friend Cooper Tomlinson. From there he made a microbudget horror feature that went viral, which led directly to Obsession becoming his big theatrical debut. He's already lined up to direct a reimagining of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre for A24 next.
What's happening right now isn't really a coincidence. People in the industry have been talking about this exact pipeline, YouTube creators skipping the traditional path entirely and landing major studio deals because they already built a built-in audience. Parsons and Barker are just the latest and biggest examples of it actually paying off.
If you're into horror at all, this is one of those rare moments where two genuinely great movies are out at the same time. Go watch them both while they're still on the big screen.