By MICHAEL GINGOLD
During the 1970s and into the 1980s, film schools were the breeding ground for some of the most popular and distinctive moviemakers. Around the mid-’80s, Hollywood turned to the realms of music videos and commercials to find up-and-coming directing talent. In the 2000s, as the media landscape changed, social media—particularly YouTube—became the place for burgeoning auteurs to launch their careers, without needing a lot of money or connections to do it.
Social media has become the great equalizer, a place where anyone from anywhere can get their abilities noticed. This is particularly true of the horror genre, where the short form has always thrived. Creating a minimovie to serve as a calling card or a proof of concept for a planned feature is not a new idea, but on-line platforms have provided an open market to place them where all eyes can see them.
YouTube and similar sites “are where the industry is looking,” says Cameron Gallagher, who recently finished shooting a full-length film based on his popular short IT VISITS ME. “Roy Lee, the [veteran genre] producer, is on TikTok and Instagram and YouTube scouring for new filmmakers and new ideas. To know there is an open line of communication between a random kid in upstate New York and a massive Hollywood producer is a unique thing, and exciting.”
Just now beginning release across America is OBSESSION (pictured above, and reviewed here), from writer/director Curry Barker, who came up via his and creative partner Cooper Tomlinson’s that’s a bad idea channel. They first received widespread notice for their hour-long, $800 MILK & SERIAL, which has logged over two million views since it was posted in August 2024. However, Barker reveals that he was already deep into OBSESSION when MILK & SERIAL went live, and it was a 24-minute movie from 2023—one that has amassed over nine million YouTube views—that landed him his feature deal.
“What actually got me OBSESSION was a short called THE CHAIR,” he explains. “This producer, James Harris, came up to me and said, ‘I loved THE CHAIR, and I’m looking for a filmmaker to do [a genre movie on] a certain budget and I want to do a feature version of THE CHAIR. I said, ‘Well, listen, THE CHAIR is really cool, and I’m excited about that, but I’d like to pitch you this idea for a movie called OBSESSION that I’m working on.’ He loved that idea, and said, ‘Let’s do it.’”
Even as he has ventured into a higher-budget arena, Barker says he has taken practical lessons from his YouTube days with him. “You learn to do things scrappy,” he notes. “When we’re having these budgeting meetings, and they’re telling me I have to cut pages or something and I don’t want to do that, I start to come up with creative ideas to do it cheaper, because that’s my background.”
An early example of YouTube-to-feature success was Jon Watts—even though he wasn’t seriously trying to attract that kind of attention. Watts, screenwriter Christopher Ford and some former New York University classmates had a YouTube page where they would post comedic shorts. “One weekend,” he recalled in a 2016 interview, “I was like, ‘You know that horror-movie idea we always joke about, with the guy turning into a clown in a Cronenbergian way? Let’s make it as a fake trailer, and see if we can fool the handful of people who follow us on YouTube.’ So we went out and shot it, just for fun. As we were editing that, it was turning out pretty convincing, and the last thing we put in was a title card saying that it was from Eli Roth.”
They posted their faux CLOWN preview one day, and woke up the next morning to find that it had gone viral—and that Roth had noticed. “I got a call warning me, ‘Eli’s gonna call you.’ I was thinking, ‘Oh no, what have we done?’ When he called, I was like, ‘Please don’t sue us, we were just joking around!’ And he was like, ‘No, this is cool!’ and listed a bunch of movies it reminded him of, because he’s like an encyclopedia. He was an NYU guy too, so that maybe helped a little bit. Then he asked, ‘Do you guys want to make this movie?’” The result was Watts making his feature directorial debut on a CLOWN expansion with Roth as a producer; his second movie was the Kevin Bacon-starring thriller COP CAR, which led directly to Marvel’s SPIDER-MAN trilogy.
You don’t even have to specialize in narrative storytelling to win the kind of on-line audience favor that can be parlayed into big-screen opportunity. A major YouTube-to-movies success story this year was Mark Fischbach, who started posting gaming videos in 2012 as Markiplier and saw his channel become one of the most popular in the site’s history. The monetization of that success allowed him to self-finance a cinematic adaptation of the IRON LUNG video game, which brought in over $40 million at the U.S. box office—outgrossing studio-released contemporaries like 28 YEARS LATER: THE BONE TEMPLE and PRIMATE.
Similarly, Chris Stuckmann built up a massive following talking about film, starting with his Quick Movie Reviews channel. When he first started posting his critiques, “I didn’t even know you could have a ‘career’ on YouTube,” he recalls, “because people weren’t doing that. There were only a few people talking about movies on the platform, and only a few people who were able to actually support themselves at the time.
“Filmmaking was always in the back of my mind,” he continues. “I would often try to incorporate sketches or wraparound segments or Halloween specials, and YouTube was a great way to build an audience that also liked movies, and was supportive of movies and supportive of me.” When Stuckmann launched a Kickstarter campaign for his first feature SHELBY OAKS in March 2022, it set a horror-film record for the crowdfunding site, earning nearly $1.4 million. Horror hero Mike Flanagan came aboard as an executive producer during postproduction; Neon acquired the worldwide rights just before its premiere at Fantasia Fest, footed the bill for additional shooting and editing and opened it nationwide last October.
Other careers launched by YouTube exposure range from Fede Álvarez, whose 2009 short ATAQUE DE PÁNICO! (PANIC ATTACK) got the attention of Sam Raimi’s Ghost House Pictures—leading to the EVIL DEAD remake, DON’T BREATHE and beyond—and Kane Parsons, a.k.a. Kane Pixels, whose creepypasta-inspired short series THE BACKROOMS has accumulated tens of millions of views and who has a feature version hitting theaters May 29. Dylan Clark and Joe Russo, writer/director and co-writer respectively of the upcoming YouTube-launched feature PORTRAIT OF GOD, point to another example as particularly inspirational: LIGHTS OUT by David F. Sandberg, a.k.a. ponysmasher, which went from 2013 viral short to 2016 theatrical hit, and which Sandberg followed with ANNABELLE: CREATION, SHAZAM! and UNTIL DAWN.
In the LIGHTS OUT short, Russo says, “The engine for the scares was so brilliant and cleanly demonstrated, it’s no wonder it translated so effortlessly into a fun feature film. And it all started with a no-budget YouTube short made by a husband and wife whose whole lives changed overnight.”
Then there are Danny and Michael Philippou, the Australian twins who became an Internet sensation via the clips, often showcasing crazy stunts, on their RackaRacka channel. Their first feature, however, was the serious, sober-minded horror film TALK TO ME, which became a sleeper hit in 2023. (As an example of how quickly cyclical the scene has become, one of Barker and Tomlinson’s that’s a bad idea shorts was a spoof of TALK TO ME.) They followed it up with 2025’s acclaimed BRING HER BACK, and credit the handmade creation of their RackaRacka shorts with being their film school.
“Doing the YouTube stuff, or even the videos we made before YouTube,” Danny says, “we were handling so many of the creative aspects ourselves, like editing and trying to do the effects, so it allowed us to hone our craft in every single aspect. That helped strengthen us on all sides, so we have a little bit of knowledge of a whole bunch of different elements.”
Their experiences in the cyber-realm also informed the subject matter of TALK TO ME, which addresses how people watch and process what they see and post on-line. “We wanted to capture this YouTube/TikTok generation of people who are recording these experiences for fun, or doing things as a cry for attention,” Danny says. Adds Michael, “It wasn’t necessarily reactions to our videos, but the whole on-line culture. Usually, you don’t do things that literally affect you because they’re bad, whereas now it’s like, you do those things and film them! That’s the kind of thing that will get you noticed, and the line is kind of blurred between what’s good attention and what’s bad attention.”
How to win the good attention is the ongoing question for those seeking to promote themselves and their work on YouTube. “It’s something of an ongoing joke among my YouTube friends that none of us understand how the algorithm works,” says PORTRAIT OF GOD’s Clark. “It feels like it’s constantly changing, and therefore incredibly hard to navigate. That said, there are a few big factors I believe make the most difference if you want to stand out: genre, title, thumbnail, runtime. Shorts in the horror genre have always had an easier time getting noticed on YouTube, and the title and thumbnail are your primary marketing tools, and therefore incredibly important. They need to stand out and sell your project to someone scrolling on their phone, since that’s the reality of where most people watch YouTube.
“Don’t be too afraid to use an image that might be a little spoilery as your thumbnail,” he continues. “At the end of the day, if that spoilery image gets someone to watch the film, that’s more important than hiding a surprise they’ll never see otherwise. Probably most overlooked is runtime—the shorter the better for YouTube. Anything under 10 minutes feels most primed for success. All that said, I’ve seen projects do incredibly well on YouTube without checking any of these boxes. The quality of your work is still the most important thing; that’s what gets people to share it around, which is the only truly reliable way for the YouTube algorithm to take notice.”
“When it comes to standing out on YouTube, execution is important, but concept is king,” Russo states. “It didn’t matter that PORTRAIT OF GOD was a low-budget short produced over a few days by a bunch of film students; the ideas in it were so big and so rich, it stopped everyone in their tracks who saw it.”
“It comes down to being true to what you want to make,” says Gallagher. “If you’re trying to beat the algorithm or stand out from the crowd, you will end up failing. If you create the thing you want to see, it will find its audience. That’s something I had to learn the hard way over years of posting short films. I didn’t think IT VISITS ME was going to perform on YouTube, because it’s character-focused and not loaded with scares, but it was an idea I was excited about. Ultimately, that was what people were drawn to. They loved the characters and wanted more, which is a testament to Sarah and Hayley [Hallisey and Gasbarro, stars of the short who encore in the feature]. It was the character work that stood out and made it interesting.”
In addition, Gallagher says, “YouTube wants to bring people to the project. It wants your videos to do well, because it wants people to spend time on the site. By making what you want, the audience will find it because the platform wants that audience to find it. That’s another perk of the site.”
Clark, Russo and co-producer Sam Evenson secured the dream backing of Ghost House, Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions and Universal Pictures for the PORTRAIT OF GOD feature, and Clark emphasizes the involvement of Evenson—and YouTube networking in general—as an important factor. “I had been a fan of Sam’s work on YouTube and we had some mutuals on the platform, so we hopped on a call to meet and chat. A few weeks later, Sam asked me if he could share the short with Joe, who was a producer he knew. We all got on a call, and Joe said he wanted to share the PORTRAIT short with some production companies to see if there was any interest in developing a feature. What I love most about this whole journey is that it started with getting to know Sam. It’s a great testament to how important it is to reach out and connect with fellow creatives.”
In that sense, YouTube has become just as important to the development of new genre talent as the festival circuit, and Clark believes that either one can be equally valuable. “It very much depends on the project and the filmmaker,” he says. “I’ve seen YouTube exposure do wonders for people where festivals didn’t, and I’ve seen festivals do wonders where YouTube couldn’t. Conversely, I’ve seen shorts blow up on YouTube and do very little for the creator, and projects go to big festivals and come out the other side empty-handed. Personally, I assess each project on its own in deciding whether a festival run is worth considering. I didn’t think PORTRAIT OF GOD made sense for fests, so I pretty much put it right on-line, and it was the correct thing to do. If PORTRAIT was twice the length, I might have considered a festival route because YouTube would have been riskier.”
For his part, Russo firmly believes the Internet is the way to go. “One of my biggest regrets is taking my student film MOVIE SCREENING SECURITY GUARDS off-line right as it started going viral. One of my professors convinced me it would hurt my chances at getting the short into festivals. I’ve always wondered what could’ve been… In 2015, I produced the short MONSTERS for KNOCK AT THE CABIN screenwriters Steve Desmond and Michael Sherman. This time, we launched it on-line, and not only did it get a great response, the feedback was so positive, festivals came to us to program it! Since then, I’ve dropped almost every short I’ve been involved with on-line first. The reach—and the possibilities that come from that reach—are limitless.”
Sean Plummer contributed to this article; you can read more of his coverage of OBSESSION in RUE MORGUE #230, now on sale.
