Studios chase YouTube nightmares after Backrooms box office boom
Internet-born horror projects including The Mandela Catalogue, Siren Head and SCP are drawing studio deals after recent breakout hits.
By Georgia Hale · Staff Writer
3 min read
The next studio horror bet may come from a teenager’s bedroom edit, a Reddit fiction thread or a monster that first crawled across social feeds.
United Artists, Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment and Amazon MGM Studios acquired film rights to The Mandela Catalogue on July 2 after an 11-studio auction, according to the report. A day earlier, Warner Bros. won a five-studio contest for Siren Head, the viral creature created by artist Trevor Henderson.
Another online horror universe is also headed to theaters. Variety reported that Spooky Pictures and Image Nation Studios are making V/H/S: SCP, a 2027 film that will bring the fan-built SCP Foundation setting into the V/H/S found-footage series.
Why studios are looking online
The rush follows big box-office results for internet-connected horror. Box Office Mojo lists Backrooms at about $384 million worldwide as of July 20, after a domestic opening of more than $81 million. The film was directed by Kane Parsons, a YouTube filmmaker who was 20 when it opened, and it had a reported $10 million production budget.
Backrooms grew from an anonymous 2019 image of a yellow, empty-looking room posted to 4chan. The idea spread through Reddit, wikis, games and online fiction before Parsons, then 16, released the nine-minute YouTube short The Backrooms (Found Footage). His video drew tens of millions of views within weeks, according to the report, before he expanded the concept into a wider series.
Obsession showed a related path. Its writer-director Curry Barker built an audience through online horror projects including The Chair and Milk & Serial, a found-footage feature made for about $800 and released on YouTube. Variety reported that Obsession, made for about $750,000, has grossed more than $428 million worldwide.
Fan bases arrive before the movie
The Mandela Catalogue began in 2021, when creator Alex Kister was 17 and making the series with basic editing tools and footage shot around his home. The YouTube analog horror series follows a Wisconsin county threatened by beings called Alternates, entities that torment people psychologically before taking their identities. The series has drawn more than 100 million views, according to the report.
Siren Head also arrived with a crowd already in place. Henderson’s 2018 illustration became an online urban legend as fans pushed the towering siren-headed monster into animations, games, short films, stories, Roblox and Minecraft. Shutter Authority’s first Siren Head video has more than 241 million views on YouTube.
The SCP Foundation offers a different kind of ready-made mythology. The project started in 2008 as a collaborative fiction wiki where writers catalogue paranormal creatures, objects and incidents. The planned V/H/S: SCP is being produced by Roy Lee and Steven Schneider, according to Variety.
Creators are being kept close
Studios are not only buying names with online recognition. They are also betting on creators who already know how audiences respond to their worlds.
In a Vanity Fair interview, Backrooms producer Kori Adelson said Parsons’ YouTube work showed a level of technical skill “more advanced than most experienced filmmakers.” The report says Parsons built the original series in Blender, and that the digital models helped guide a 30,000-square-foot set for the movie.
Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group co-chair Mike De Luca described the fan feedback loop in remarks at the Producers Guild of America’s conference, according to TheWrap. By the time these projects become films, he said, creators have effectively gone through extensive audience testing.
Other online-to-theater moves are already in the works. Deadline reported that Dylan Clark’s YouTube short Portrait of God is being developed as a Universal feature produced by Jordan Peele and Sam Raimi. Variety reported that Sam Evenson is directing a feature version of his short Mora for Neon.
Reddit is in the mix too. Elias Witherow’s Tommy Taffy story from r/NoSleep is being adapted as The Third Parent, with David Michaels writing and directing and Crispin Glover starring as Tommy. The film is scheduled for Jan. 22, 2027, according to the report.
This story draws on original reporting from Mashable.