I remember exactly where I was when I first saw a clip of Backrooms on my feed. For about 10 seconds, I was convinced that I was looking at footage from some unhinged found-footage horror movie I’d somehow missed. Then I clicked through and realized the guy who made it is 20 years old and started building an entire mythology on YouTube when he was still in high school. A few weeks later, Obsession, a movie made for $750,000 by a sketch-comedy YouTuber, quietly outgrossed a brand-new Star Wars release. At that point, it stopped feeling like a coincidence and started feeling like a pattern that had existed in plain sight for years.
YouTube has been acting as an unofficial film school, producing creators who learned directing, editing, visual effects, and audience engagement long before Hollywood came calling. Bo Burnham was uploading comedy songs from his childhood bedroom back in 2006, and he eventually turned that instinct into Eighth Grade, one of the best coming-of-age movies of the last decade. What’s happening right now with Backrooms and Obsession is the same pipeline finally hitting its stride. And horror, for reasons that probably say more about you and me than the filmmakers, is where it’s going the hardest. Here are 10 YouTubers who made movies.
Why You Should Trust Me: I have spent six years writing about movies and television, with the last three and a half focused primarily on entertainment at MovieWeb. I’ve covered the theatrical horror boom extensively, including writing about new releases as they broke box office records this year. I follow the YouTube-to-Hollywood transition closely enough to know which creators are part of a genuine trend and which are one-off stories.
Joe Penna
The Stop-Motion YouTuber Who Stranded Anna Kendrick on a Spaceship
Joe Penna built his early reputation on YouTube on MysteryGuitarMan, a channel created around stop-motion animation and music videos that, at its peak, pulled in over 400 million views and landed a spot in the platform’s Top 10. His transition to feature films wasn’t instant. Penna spent years directing commercials and short films, including one produced by Ron Howard, before his directorial debut, Arctic in 2019. It’s a nearly wordless survival drama starring Mads Mikkelsen as a man stranded after a plane crash.
He followed it up with Stowaway in 2021, a Netflix sci-fi drama starring Anna Kendrick and Toni Collette set aboard a Mars-bound spacecraft, circling an impossible moral dilemma. Both movies share a directorial signature – small casts, enclosed spaces, and hard ethical choices.
Michael Shanks
The Australian Sketch YouTuber Who Made Dave Franco and Alison Brie Fuse Into One Body
Michael Shanks ran the YouTube channel timtimfed for close to two decades before making the jump to filmmaking, making him one of the longest-tenured creators on this list by the time his movie was greenlit. That movie, Together, is a supernatural body horror film starring real-life husband and wife Dave Franco and Alison Brie as a long-term couple whose codependent relationship turns literal and grotesque after they wander into the wrong cave in the countryside.
It premiered at Sundance, picked up a distribution deal with Neon, and grossed over $34 million worldwide against a modest budget. Personally, I think Together worked as a piece of horror because it never loses interest in the relationship under the gore. That one most talked-about sequence, where the two leads’ eyeballs slowly fuse? Well, it’s horrible to look at, but it’s also the most literal possible expression of the main question in the script: are you staying together because you love each other, or because you’ve run out of other options?
David F. Sandberg
The Swedish No-Budget Horror Guy Who Ended Up Directing ‘Shazam!’
Before David F. Sandberg directed DC superhero movies, he was a guy in Sweden uploading short horror films to a channel called ponysmasher. He didn’t work with a crew — just his wife, Lolla Losten, who appeared in everything he made. The short that changed his life was Lights Out, a three-minute movie about a monster that only exists in darkness, made in an apartment using an IKEA lamp. It went viral, caught James Wan’s attention, and became a feature-length movie in 2016.
From there, Sandberg’s career accelerated fast. He made Annabelle: Creation (2017) for the Conjuring universe, then Shazam! (2019) and its sequel Shazam! Fury of the Gods (2023) for the DCEU, and then the 2025 video game adaptation, Until Dawn. Sandberg also never left YouTube behind, and he still posts regularly.
Bo Burnham
The Original Crossover That Set the Bar Really High
Bo Burnham started posting comedy songs on YouTube in 2006, when he was 16, and YouTube was still young. His early videos, which he performed alone in his childhood bedroom, turned him into one of the first true YouTube-to-mainstream success stories, leading to a stand-up career, multiple Comedy Central specials, and eventually three Netflix specials, including the universally acclaimed Inside.
However, it’s his pivot to filmmaking that makes him worth including on the list. In 2018, Burnham wrote and directed Eighth Grade, a coming-of-age drama starring Elsie Fisher as an anxious teenager navigating the last week of middle school in a world saturated by social media. It was a formative movie for me because Burnham brought a granular level of authenticity to the teenage experience and nailed the speech and behavior. Burnham was a proof of concept for everything that has happened since in the storytelling landscape.
Dan Trachtenberg
The Podcast Host and Portal Fan-Filmmaker Who Now Runs the ‘Predator’ Franchise
Dan Trachtenberg’s trajectory runs through internet film culture, more than YouTube specifically. He co-hosted The Totally Rad Show, a video podcast that generated a loyal following discussing movies, video games, and comics. The breakthrough came with the 2011 short film called Portal: No Escape, a live-action adaptation of the Valve video game that racked up millions of views and showed he could do a lot visually with almost no budget.
That short got Trachtenberg signed, and after years of development hell on other projects, he landed his feature debut with 10 Cloverfield Lane, a tense bunker thriller starring John Goodman and Mary Elizabeth Winstead. Since then, Trachtenberg has become the steward of an entire franchise. He directed Prey, the best-reviewed Predator movie in decades, and has continued shaping that universe with Predator: Killer of Killers and Predator: Badlands. He’s also directed the pilot of Amazon’s The Boys and an episode of Black Mirror.
Chris Stuckmann
The Movie Critic Who Decided He’d Rather Be Reviewed Than Review
Chris Stuckmann spent over 10 years as one of YouTube’s most trusted movie critics, growing his channel past a million subscribers with reviews that broke down camera work, structure, and performance with real specificity. His story is different from most names on this list because of the discipline behind his career change. When he finally got Shelby Oaks greenlit, Stuckmann publicly stopped reviewing movies he didn’t like.
Basically, he didn’t want to be a critic taking shots at other filmmakers while asking audiences to take him seriously as one. Shelby Oaks was funded partly through Kickstarter and released theatrically in October 2025, with Stuckmann writing and directing. The reception confirmed that watching thousands of movies with real attention, breaking down what works and what doesn’t, is itself a kind of education.
Markiplier
The Let’s Play King Who Self-Financed a Horror Movie
Markiplier, born Mark Fischbach, runs one of YouTube’s largest channels. It’s based almost entirely on gaming content, particularly survival horror Let’s Plays delivered with a manic, high-energy commentary style that made him a defining personality on YouTube. Years before his feature directorial debut, he experimented with interactive choose-your-own-adventure formats through YouTube Originals like A Heist with Markiplier and In Space with Markiplier.
That practice paid off with 2026’s Iron Lung, a science fiction horror movie adapting the indie video game of the same name, which Fischbach wrote, directed, starred in, and entirely self-financed for a little over $4 million. Fan demand pushed the movie into roughly 4,000 screens on its opening weekend, an extraordinary distribution footprint for a movie with no studio backing at all.
Danny and Michael Philippou
The Stunt-Comedy Twins From RackaRacka Who Became A24’s Most Reliable Horror Bet
Danny and Michael Philippou invested many years into RackaRacka, a YouTube channel out of Adelaide built around elaborate stunt comedy and horror-tinged action shorts. Their leap to movies arrived with 2022’s Talk to Me, a supernatural horror film about teenagers who use an embalmed hand to summon spirits for a thrill. It became A24’s highest-grossing horror release at the time and grossed more than $92 million worldwide on a $4.5 million budget.
Their follow-up, Bring Her Back — shot once again in their hometown and starring Sally Hawkins — pushed the brothers further into upsetting horror territory. The Philippou brothers have this distinct YouTube sensibility. Their content is visceral and kinetic, and they’re willing to fully commit to a bit no matter how far it goes. That same sensibility carried over into A24’s arthouse register, and the results were mind-blowing.
Kane Parsons
The Teenager Who Built an Entire Mythology in His Bedroom
Kane Parsons, known online as Kane Pixels, was 14 when he first came across the original Backrooms creepypasta image circulating online. By 16, he had crafted an entire found-footage mythology around it on YouTube, complete with a fictional research institute, an internal timeline, and an atmosphere of dread that critics would later compare to some of the most effective horror filmmaking of the decade. The series accumulated millions of views per episode, and Hollywood came calling while Parsons was still a teenager working out of his bedroom in Northern California.
The feature adaptation Backrooms was released in theaters recently, when Parsons was just 20 years old, and broke records doing it. It became A24’s biggest opening weekend ever and made Parsons the youngest director in history to top the box office. As someone who religiously watched his YouTube videos, I can see the patience, the found-footage texture, and the trust that audiences will sit with dread translated to the screen, and it’s incredible.
Curry Barker
The $800 Movie Guy Who Beat a Star Wars Release at the Box Office
Curry Barker ran the sketch comedy channel that’s a bad idea with his collaborator Cooper Tomlinson. He built a loyal audience before pivoting toward horror with Milk & Serial, a found-footage feature he made on a budget of $800. That tiny, almost absurdly cheap movie went viral enough to get Hollywood’s attention, and within a year, Barker had signed with UTA and made its Toronto Film Festival debut with Obsession, a supernatural horror movie about a man whose wish for requited love comes with a horrifying catch.
The numbers on Obsession are genuinely startling. Made for under a million dollars and acquired by Focus Features for roughly $15 million out of TIFF, the movie grew at the box office in its second and third weekends. If you’re a horror fan, you know it’s a rare feat. Barker has already shot his follow-up movie and is attached to direct a new Texas Chainsaw Massacre movie for A24. For a guy who started with an $800 budget and a friend with a camera, that’s about as fast a rise as ever.
Have you seen any of these amazing movies that talented YouTubers made? Was your favorite on the list? Let us know in the comments!
Leave a Reply