A couple of weeks ago, 26-year-old YouTuber Curry Barker’s horror film Obsession made history by earning $108 million at the worldwide box office, over 100 times its budget of a modest $1 million. The film has now also released in Indian cinemas, and earned Rs 7.75 crore over its opening weekend. This week, another horror movie, directed by an even younger YouTuber, has made history again.

Kane Parsons’ sci-fi horror film Backrooms, released by A24 in 3,442 locations across the US and Canada, made an astonishing $81.5 million overs its opening weekend. Backrooms isn’t just a domestic hit either. It has also amassed $118 million worldwide, but is yet to see a release in Indian cinemas. Here are the box office records broken by the film:

With its $81.5 million opening weekend haul, Backrooms has edged past Obsession to top the North American box office. Both horror films, directed by young YouTubers in their debuts, have dethroned a major Disney tentpole — Jon Favreau’s Star Wars spin-off The Mandalorian and Grogu, which has witnessed a 70% drop from its previous weekend.

Also known as his internet identity Kane Pixels, Parsons started a web series of the same name, Backrooms, on his YouTube channel in 2022. It was based on a creepypasta of the same, which involved horror buffs sharing stories around a picture of a vacant luminescent yellow backroom. Released as The Backrooms (Found Footage), the YouTube series was made by him mostly using free 3D software Blender. The video series picked up subsequently, garnering around 200 million views combined.

One of these views included an A24 executive’s child insisting that they watch the viral horror series. That prompted the studio to rope in Parsons for a feature film adaptation of his series, milking his viral IP and loyal fanbase in the process. Backrooms, the feature film, was made on a modest budget of $10 million, still 10 times that of Obsession, but paid off massively nonetheless, now that it has earned almost 12 times its budget at the global box office.

The film revolves around a furniture store owner, Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and his therapist Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve) discovering a dimension of endless spaces at the back of his house. It boasts of latent messaging around mental health by symbolically depicting Clark’s suppressed psychological battles following his recent divorce and alcoholism.

Backrooms also stars Mark Duplass, who insisted that Parsons didn’t need any help from any of the cast members as he came fully prepared on set. “Kane was 100% in control. More so than many directors 3x his age,” he wrote on X last week, responding to a user who claimed the 20-year-old YouTuber didn’t direct the film.

Also Read — 26-year-old YouTuber’s $1M horror film Obsession earns over 100 times its budget

The actor also took to Instagram to share a video, in which he lauded films like Backrooms and Obsession from shaking up a fractured “industry”. “We’ve got an example of creators woodshedding things, putting them online, building an audience, and now the people with the purse strings are going to notice probably a little bit sooner because they see what they can do at the box office in the form of these two films that are overperforming,” he said.