2026 has been a fantastic year for creator-led movies so far. With successes like Obsession, Backrooms, The Amazing Digital Circus: The Last Act, and Ironlung, it's proof that creative talent can come from any platform, especially YouTube. One of these movies, though, has had a profound impact on how Hollywood executives and agents source their next project.
Backrooms could have caused an Internet horror Golden Age
Backrooms, directed by young filmmaker and YouTuber Kane Parsons (aka Kane Pixels), is A24's highest-grossing movie domestically to date. It's based on the viral creepypasta of the same name, created by an anonymous user. Parsons made it his own by adding more to the lore and telling an original narrative inspired by the original short story.
Parsons' series of shorts on YouTube gained traction and became one of the most popular interpretations of the Backrooms mythology. That same audience helped make his directorial debut a success because it was just as much an honest piece of art as it was an entertaining horror movie. A near-indie project put legacy Hollywood franchises to shame. However, it seems like the bigger studios are taking note, and surprisingly, in the right ways.
3 Internet-horror movies were greenlit within the last week
I had a gut feeling many competing studios and production companies would follow A24's lead, and I'm still shocked to see the risks they're finally taking.
Warner Bros. won a competitive bidding war to acquire the film rights to Siren Head, a popular Internet horror icon created by artist and writer Trevor Henderson. The movie will be directed by Brian Duffield (Whalefall) and written by Zach Cregger (Weapons). Siren Head is usually depicted as an impossibly tall, mangled man with sirens for a head, or sometimes multiple heads. It has that same unexplainable weirdness as the Backrooms. A mysterious creature, hard to kill, could probably kill you –– we can see where this would go for a movie. I'm also confident Zach Cregger can write a good horror movie, considering his spectacular work on Weapons.
Amazon MGM Studios also won a competitive bidding war to acquire the film rights for The Mandela Catalogue–– a popular analog horror series on YouTube created by Alex Kister. He's set to direct the movie, produced by none other than Steven Spielberg. This surprised me, considering it's way more cryptic than Backrooms. But there's undeniably an audience for this franchise. The Mandela Catalogue is about a town infested with shape-shifting monsters called 'Alternates.' It's basically what you get if you blended Invasion of the Body Snatchers with found-footage horror. I like that Kister is the head of the ship on his IP with someone like Steven Spielberg to support him.
One more announcement, this time in the indie scene. Per Variety, Spooky Pictures and Image Nations Studios are collaborating to produce a feature-length film based on the SCP Foundation, a community-driven mythology, as a V/H/S anthology. The SCP Foundation (Secure. Contain. Protect.) is a fictional organization and collaborative storytelling project where users can submit their weird creatures, items, locations, and more as designated "SCPs" the organization keeps under containment. For example, there's SCP-173, a freaky-looking statue that kills anyone who looks away from it. There's also SCP-049, a plague doctor who rambles on about a sickness only he can detect, and "cures" the afflicted by turning them into zombies. There are hundreds of thousands of these fictionally documented anomalies that are perfect for a found-footage style movie. It all sounds well and good, but it doesn't seem like Spooky Pictures or Image Nations Studios have contacted SCP Wiki staff or any of the writers for an "official" collaboration for this major movie.
The SCP Foundation is under Creative Commons, which means anyone can make anything based on the original stories, so long as it's also under Creative Commons. This is probably why no bigger studios would waste pouring millions of dollars into an IP they can't own. It's fine if indie filmmakers want to create something SCP, but for it to be a project this big, without any contact with the original community curators and creators of the stories, kind of reads as using the SCP name to put butts in seats. Perhaps it's in name only, and they change the characters and lore just enough so that they can copyright it. Or who knows, maybe it's a genuine love letter to SCP, and they won't milk it for all its worth. We'll have to wait and see how they handle things. It's expected to release in 2027.
I find it ironic, though, that companies like Warner Bros. and Amazon MGM went through the trouble to fairly compensate the original creators, and even have them in the writer's room, but an indie company can't show that same appreciation.
It's just the beginning
A friendly reminder that Backrooms is definitely not the first creepypasta/internet folkloric horror to hit the big screen. If anyone remembers, we had Slender Man back in 2018. It, unfortunately, wasn't very good. That saddens me because I'm a huge fan of the character. However, Backrooms has reignited the film industry's curiosity about indie horror, with studios once again willing to give these obscure occult figures a chance in the wider market. Reportedly, many talent seekers are turning to Reddit for weird stories that could be turned into movies.
All things considered, I think this is a good thing. Sure, we might get a lot of cheap projects, but it seems like big studios are taking it seriously. From what I can tell so far, they're not trying to push aside the creators. Trevor Henderson is the executive producer of Siren Head. Alex Kister is directing The Mandela Catalogue. This is what audiences also support, other than their favorite stories; especially among Gen Z, it's creator-led media and new talent.
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