YouTube Horror Is Suddenly Eating Hollywood’s Lunch

Hollywood spent years treating YouTube like the audition room. This weekend, the audition room grabbed the keys to the studio. Kane Parsons, 20, turned the fluorescent nightmare of Backrooms into an A24 movie now heading toward an $80 million-plus opening — on a reported $10 million budget. That would flatten A24’s old opening record and put a meme-born horror maze ahead of far more traditional franchise muscle. And Curry Barker’s Obsession is still climbing in weekend three, because apparently the new Hollywood development process is: upload terror, build lore, make executives pretend they discovered it first. The scariest room in Hollywood is no longer yellow wallpaper. It’s the conference room where someone has to explain why the YouTube kids beat the grown-ups.