Opinion: Hollywood Found Horror’s Future on YouTube. Stop Handing Them Reboots.
Today, two days before Halloween, the director of the biggest original horror movie of the decade is putting out his newest scary story the same way he put out his first ones: free, on YouTube, to anyone with a phone. Curry Barker's short Mama Bear premieres on YouTube on October 29, made in partnership with Windows. It comes with, as Dread Central put it, "just a title and the promise of something new before Halloween." It is the most Curry Barker move possible, and it lands six months after Hollywood handed him the keys to a 52-year-old chainsaw.
Here's my take, and I'll defend it all the way down: YouTube is now the most reliable source of new horror filmmakers in the business, and the industry's first instinct with every one of them is to point them at somebody else's franchise. That instinct is backwards. The whole reason these filmmakers are worth hundreds of millions is that they made things nobody asked for. If studios want the next Obsession , they have to stop treating that kind of talent as a cheap way to reboot The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
The Scoreboard Doesn't Lie
Look at what came out of YouTube in the last twelve months alone. Obsession , which Barker wrote, directed and edited, cost at most $750,000. It premiered in TIFF's Midnight Madness section on September 5, 2025, Focus Features grabbed it for a reported $14 million to $15 million (the most ever paid for a genre film at TIFF), and it opened May 15, 2026. It started with a modest $17.2 million, good for third place, then actually grew 39% in its second weekend. It has now made roughly $520 million worldwide, including about $263 million domestic. It's Focus Features' biggest film ever, the top-grossing festival acquisition of all time (passing The Blair Witch Project ), and it holds a 93% on Rotten Tomatoes with an A- CinemaScore.
Two weeks after Obsession opened, A24 released Backrooms , the feature version of the web series Kane Parsons started uploading to his Kane Pixels channel in January 2022. Made for under $10 million with Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve, it opened to $81.5 million domestic on May 29 and had reached $394.1 million worldwide by late August, with an 87% on Rotten Tomatoes. Film Stories calls it the most successful movie in A24's history. Parsons is 20 years old.
And back in January, Mark Fischbach, the YouTuber the internet knows as Markiplier, put out Iron Lung himself. No studio. He planned on roughly 60 independent theaters, fans demanded more, and it opened on 4,161 screens worldwide, eventually earning about $51.2 million on a budget reported at $3 million (Fischbach says closer to $4 million to $5 million). He even pressed the discs himself.
That's three movies, three very different routes to theaters, and more than $960 million combined from creators who learned the craft uploading videos. No other farm system in horror is producing numbers like that right now. Not festivals, not film schools, not the shorts circuit.
This Pipeline Is Older Than You Think
None of this is brand new, which is exactly why the pattern deserves a hard look. In 2013, David F. Sandberg and his wife, Lotta Losten, made a short called Lights Out for a film competition. It didn't win. It did spread across the internet, agents came calling, and James Wan's team helped turn it into a 2016 feature for New Line that cost $4.9 million and made $148.9 million worldwide.
Then look at what Sandberg got to do next: Annabelle: Creation (a franchise spinoff), Shazam! and Shazam! Fury of the Gods (superhero films), and Until Dawn (a video game adaptation). Talented work, every bit of it. But after the second Shazam! in 2023, Sandberg said publicly that he was done with superheroes and wanted to get back to horror. It took a filmmaker with a proven original voice about a decade to get away from other people's IP, and he still landed on a game adaptation.
Photo: David F. Sandberg by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license).
Danny and Michael Philippou, the Australian brothers behind the RackaRacka channel, are the other cautionary tale. Talk to Me cost $4.5 million and made about $92.2 million worldwide for A24 in 2023. Within weeks, in August 2023, a sequel called Talk 2 Me was in the works, and the brothers were also being linked to a Street Fighter movie. To their enormous credit, they made the original Bring Her Back next instead. It cost $15 million and opened to about $7 million in late May 2025. Smaller than Talk to Me , yes. But it was theirs, and it proved they weren't a one-trick séance.
Now Look Where Curry Barker Is Being Pointed
On April 21, 2026, weeks before Obsession even hit theaters, Variety reported that A24 had hired Barker to direct a reimagining of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. A24 won the franchise rights in a heated 2025 bidding fight. Original co-writer Kim Henkel is an executive producer, Roy Lee and Steven Schneider are producing, and it's actually A24's second Leatherface project: a TV series from Glen Powell's Barnstorm with JT Mollner directing is also in development. Mollner, tellingly, has said he doesn't want to remake the original because he considers it perfect.
The last time anyone tried, it went badly. Netflix's 2022 Texas Chainsaw Massacre , the franchise's ninth film, sits at 30% on Rotten Tomatoes. Barker's would be the tenth. The single most valuable new voice in horror, whose film made half a billion dollars out of a story nobody had heard before, is spending prime years of his career on a property that has been remade, rebooted, prequeled and requeled since 1974.
Kane Parsons' trajectory is drifting the same way, just inside his own world. In September, Dread Central reported Parsons will direct Backrooms 2 next for A24, reportedly under a deal worth around $65 million. A planned collaboration with Longlegs filmmaker Osgood Perkins, with Perkins writing and Parsons directing, now sounds like it has been pushed back. A sequel to your own creation is a lot less troubling than a 50-year-old reboot. Still, the brand-new idea just moved to the back of the line.
Why YouTube Makes Better Original Horror
It's worth being specific about why this pipeline works, because it explains why the reboot instinct wastes it. YouTube horror filmmakers learn in public, at volume, with instant feedback. Barker and his creative partner Cooper Tomlinson have run the sketch channel That's a Bad Idea since 2017, building it to about 1.6 million subscribers while Barker worked at Starbucks. His 2023 horror short The Chair pulled more than 10 million views. His first feature, Milk & Serial , cost $800, spent a year without a distributor, and only found its audience when he posted it free.
That is a filmmaker who was trained by an audience, not by notes from a franchise steward. The same goes for Parsons, who built the Backrooms mythology episode by episode while viewers picked apart every frame, and for Fischbach, who has spent more than a decade learning exactly what makes his audience lean in. What these people are uniquely good at is building something from nothing and making strangers care about it. Rebooting Leatherface uses almost none of that skill. It uses their marketability.
The economics point the same way. Studios love IP because it feels safe. But no reboot in recent memory has delivered anything like a 690-to-1 return on budget. The originals are the safe bet now. Obsession and Backrooms together made more than $900 million on combined budgets of under $11 million. The franchises are the gamble.
The Other Side
The fair counterargument is a strong one, so let's give it room. First, nobody is forcing Barker to do anything. He signed on to Texas Chain Saw , and filmmakers have every right to want to play with the toys that scared them as kids. Some of the best horror ever made is a remake: John Carpenter's The Thing , David Cronenberg's The Fly. A filmmaker with Barker's sense of dread might make the first Leatherface movie in decades that actually matters.
Second, he isn't only doing IP. Anything But Ghosts , his original horror-comedy with Tomlinson, hits theaters through Focus on May 7, 2027, and in June he signed on to write, direct and produce another original horror film for Universal. Third, the YouTube pipeline isn't a guaranteed hit machine. Iron Lung sits at 59% on Rotten Tomatoes. Chris Stuckmann's Shelby Oaks , funded by a record-setting Kickstarter of about $1.39 million from 14,720 backers, earned around $8.1 million worldwide after Neon released it in October 2025, with a 55% critics score. Studios aren't wrong to want a recognizable title as insurance when a creator's fanbase doesn't automatically become a ticket-buying audience.
All true. But that argument is about individual choices, and mine is about the pattern. When the reward for making the most successful original horror film of the decade is a reboot offer before your movie even opens, the industry is telling every 19-year-old uploading shorts tonight what it actually values. That message matters more than any single movie.
What Studios Should Do Instead
Here's the fix, and it isn't complicated. Give YouTube-trained filmmakers original-first deals: two original features before anyone mentions a franchise. Give them the budgets the Philippous got for Bring Her Back , not blockbuster money that comes with blockbuster notes. Let them keep their channels alive as testing grounds, the way Barker is doing with Mama Bear today. And when a sequel makes sense, let it be a sequel to something they invented, the way Backrooms 2 at least is.
Because the next Obsession is probably already online right now, sitting at 40,000 views, made by somebody who has never been inside a studio. The question is whether they'll get to make their second idea, or whether they'll be handed someone else's first one.
Bottom Line
YouTube has become horror's best talent scout, and 2026 proved it with real money: about half a billion for Obsession , nearly $400 million for Backrooms , and a self-distributed Iron Lung that cleared $50 million without a studio. Pointing those filmmakers at Texas Chain Saw reboots might produce a good movie. It will almost certainly produce fewer great new ones. I'd rather watch Curry Barker's fifth original idea than his take on Leatherface, and I'll be watching Mama Bear tonight to remind myself why.
Now tell us we're wrong: would you rather see Curry Barker's Texas Chain Saw Massacre or a brand-new Barker original nobody has heard of yet?
Related on The Horror Feed
Header photo: Mark Fischbach (Markiplier) via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license), cropped with text added.
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Sources: Dread Central (Mama Bear), Obsession box office and release history, Curry Barker career overview, TheWrap, Fangoria (Texas Chain Saw), Film Stories, Backrooms box office, TheWrap (Backrooms trailer), Iron Lung box office, Talk to Me box office, JoBlo (Talk 2 Me), Fangoria (Bring Her Back), Lights Out, David F. Sandberg, Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022), Shelby Oaks.
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