The guys behind 'Obsession' and 'Backrooms' are both under 30, and are bringing their generation back to the movie theatre.
Hollywood got a wake-up call this weekend—and two Gen Z YouTubers were on the other end. When box office returns came in by Sunday evening, two low-budget horror films—Backrooms and Obsessions—had achieved several simultaneous history-making records. The A24-backed Backrooms set the record for the highest debut ever, $81 million, for an original horror film, as well as the best debut ever for a first time director on a non-franchise film, per Variety. That director, 20-year-old Kane Parsons, is also the youngest director in history to have a #1 film.
That would be enough to make end-of-May box office something of a spectacular anomaly, but it wasn’t the end of the story. While Backrooms shattered records at the top of the charts, the weekend’s #2 film Obsession upended expectations. After a $17 million debut two weeks ago, Obsession’s ticket sales rose in each of its subsequent weekends, the first film since E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial to do so outside of a holiday weekend. Obsession has now made more than $106 million on a budget of less than $1 million.
The men behind Backrooms and Obsession — Kane Parsons and Curry Barker, respectively — have now become the hottest commodities in Hollywood. They’re navigating multi-million dollar deals, sequel talk and generally waking Hollywood up to the end of IP slop. (It’s no small feat that they came in #1 and #2 just one week after Disney launched The Mandalorian and Grogu, which landed in third after suffering a massive 70% drop.)
20-year-old Kane Parsons, now the hottest director in Hollywood, debuted Backrooms on YouTube as a web series in 2022. The first episode, “Found Footage,” which now has over 81 million views, was based off an image that went viral first on the controversial site 4Chan, then later Reddit, of a liminal windowless space plastered with yellowed wallpaper.
“I came across the original image on my computer … and I just thought, huh, it would be interesting to see if I could go to my 3D software, Blender, and try to recreate a scene in this environment,” Parsons, who was 16 years old at the time and still in high school, told ABC News. The earliest videos Kane released, under the YouTube username Kane Pixels, told the story of a shadowy government organization called ASYNC that opens a portal between the real worlds and the Backrooms, a series of neverending yellow hallways.
“I want to make something is telling this story which I believe is meaningful, that I have come up with, while also maintaining that feeling that was present in the original post,” Parsons said to ABC. “So I think it’s a balance.”
Parsons uploaded 22 videos set in the Backrooms series to YouTube. He didn’t expect to go the Hollywood route right away, and instead thought he would go to film school, but he ended up pitching the film version of Backrooms to A24 the same week his college applications were due, per Vanity Fair.
Parson said in a 2022 interview that he had already been making films by the time he was 11 or 12 years old and that he started learning effects technology in order to make a film set in the world of Little Nightmares, a horror platform video game. He taught himself to use software such as Adobe After Effects and Blender in his bedroom in order to make effects on some of his earliest work.
Parson’s talent is no fluke, and industry insiders who have worked with him attest that he is, in fact, the real deal.
“His work is so singular and evocative,” Kori Adelson, a producer at North Road Films, told Vanity Fair. “And in terms of his technical skill set? It was more advanced than most experienced filmmakers.” Adelson also said that shortly after Backrooms stars Renate Reinsve and Chiwetel Ejiofor met Parsons, they called to say “he’s an absolute genius.”
“He is a really special talent, and I know he has a lot of other stories to tell, both in the Backrooms world and otherwise,” Adelson says. “We will be in the Kane business as long as he allows it.”
Barker, who is 26, is a consummate YouTube content creator, just like Parsons. He attended the New York Film Academy (at the Los Angeles campus) where he met Cooper Tomlinson, who would go on to star as Ian, the main character’s best friend in Obsession. Tomlinson and Barker started making videos together, which they published on the video streaming site. “It became our film school outside of film school,” Tomlinson told the New Yorker.
Barker taught himself about camera lenses and microphones prior to his arrival at the NYFA; he wrote the sketches, which often began comedically and ended surreally, which he acted in alongside Tomlinson.
Prior to Obsession, Barker wrote and directed the 60-minute slasher film Milk & Serial, which he made for $800, per the New Yorker, and is available to stream on the duo’s YouTube page.
Barker lists the comedy duo Key & Peele as one of his major influences and, like Jordan Peele, has had a career that spans both comedy and horror, which he says are similar.
“My bread and butter is uncomfortable conversations. That’s what I love to write,” he told the New Yorker. “So when I go to a bar or I have a weird experience with a waiter, I’m always thinking about how it could be a skit.” He continued, “Being aware of the way people interact with the world is funny and scary—and it’s a tool.”
Hollywood loves nothing more than to capitalize on people’s success, and both directors are already at work on new projects.
Parsons has already said that Backrooms is not the end if that universe, and is more like an extended episode of the YouTube series. However, there are many directions for this newly-hot IP to take.
“A series would be my dream scenario, personally,” he says. “I think that’s the most practical way to narratively get what you want. But obviously, a series is a whole thing. So it won’t be immediate, it won’t be ‘snap your fingers and it’s here.’ And in general, the series, in my mind, is not determined by its genre label. The way I think of it is definitely a lot more of an interpersonal sort of drama built on top of a supernatural techno-thriller. That’s more the space I feel comfortable in.”
As for Barker, he’s already been offered a seven-figure deal for his next movie, even though he hasn’t pitched it yet. (Whether or not he is able to take that is up in the air, given that Blumhouse and Atomic Monster, the production companies behind Obsession, have a first-look deal with Universal.
But Barker, like Parsons, is not limiting himself to any one genre. Per the New Yorker, he’s also writing a hard comedy television series and is already entering postproduction on Anything But Ghosts, a supernatural film starring Aaron Paul, Bryce Dallas Howard and, of course, Tomlinson. He’s also allegedly reviving the Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise.
While both films continue to amass and break new records, even more important might be the message that they are sending to Hollywood. As previously mentioned, both Obsession and Backrooms triumphed just one week after the release of Disney’s The Mandalorian and Grogu, which seems to have no longevity at the summer box office.
Rather than fronting hundreds of millions of dollars to make box office returns, both films are extremely low budget. Backrooms cost only about $10 million to make, while Obsession, as previously mentioned, cost the studio less than $1 million.
“Blumhouse-Atomic Monster has the #1 and #2 movies in the country this weekend, both made for almost no money,” Jason Blum wrote on X. “Theaters are packed. What a time to be making scary movies.”
And the theaters were packed: on Monday, AMC Theaters shared that it enjoyed its highest attendance at theaters since 2019. AMC specifically mentioned both films in its press release, alongside Devil Wears Prada 2, Michael and the still-going Project Hail Mary.
With the Golden Age of the Superhero Movie firmly in the rearview and audiences succumbing to legacy sequel fatigue, it makes sense that Obsession and Backrooms would thrive. These are new ideas, with fresh faces, and new worlds for audiences to explore.
And while old fonts, such as superheroes and Star Wars, may be drying out, the font of YouTube and TikTok are much deeper. Starting with the success of the horror film Talk to Me in 2022, Hollywood began to take notice of directors who got their start on the small screen. (The phone, not the television.) The success of Talk to Me and Danny and Michael Philippou’s follow up Bring Her Back now seem like a test case for more directors, including Barker and Parsons, who have built followings on viral success.
