The best comment Sam Evenson has ever received on one of his YouTube horror shorts was from a fifth-grader who showed it to his classroom and traumatized a whole bunch of kids.

“It’s like, ‘Hell yeah.’ That’s exactly the kind of fifth-grader I would have been,” says the 34-year-old filmmaker.

However, it’s not just elementary-school children looking online for scary movie talent like Evenson. It’s also all of Hollywood.

Outside of Spider-Man, Odysseus and Michael Jackson, the biggest box-office hero this year has been the horror genre. Director Curry Barker’s “Obsession” became a full-on phenomenon, a film made for $750,000 that’s raked in $475 million worldwide, attracted young audiences (75% ages 18 to 34) and is one of the top streaming movies on Peacock. And “Backrooms,” a liminal creep fest made by 21-year-old wunderkind Kane Parsons, isn’t far behind with close to $400 million globally.

What do they have in common? Both Barker and Parsons became popular via their YouTube content. As did Mark “Markiplier” Fischbach, who has 39 million followers on his YouTube channel and made $50 million with his indie horror film “Iron Lung.” 

They’re just a few of the filmmakers of the future that it’s worth paying attention to now.

Dylan Clark, who had a viral hit with his 2022 horror short “Portrait of God,” has been tapped to direct a “Blair Witch Project” reboot expected next year. Evenson is writing feature-film versions of two of his most popular shorts, “Mora” and “Ignore It,” while Caleb Phillips is developing a full movie based on his 2018 short “Other Side of the Box,” which racked up 30 million views and won a SXSW film festival grand jury prize. Phillips also premiered his first horror feature “Imposters” at this year’s SXSW.

“Horror fans are definitely excited about this trend because these filmmakers are bringing original stories to the table,” says critic and podcaster BJ Colangelo. The industry is overrun with IP-mining, she says, and “audiences are hungering for something that feels fresh and not the result of a boardroom of executives who have been greenlighting the same movies for 20 years.”

According to an April 2026 Fandango survey, Gen Z and millennials are leading theatrical attendance growth. Horror films “generally skew younger,” says Rentrak senior box-office analyst Paul Dergarabedian, and three out of the five top-grossing genre movies this year are from YouTube creators. “That should send a very strong signal to film distributors and studios alike that it’s not about big budgets or big brands, it’s about originality and creativity combined in a way that scares the pants off people in the movie theater.”

YouTube is Hollywood’s ‘most efficient way to discover new talent’

Hollywood views YouTube as a tool right now “only because it’s the most efficient way to discover new talent,” says Barker, 26. (Coming soon from him: the horror comedy “Anything But Ghosts” as well as a new take on “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.”) “We live in a world where discoverability is so much more vast. We’re not slipping DVDs under executive (doors) anymore. Instead, we’re having execs find these people (on YouTube) and are like, ‘Wow, the proof is in the pudding. This guy made something cool. Let’s give them a shot.’ ”

Born and raised in Alabama, Barker had the Spielbergian experience of making his own short films as a kid and so did Evenson, who learned special effects skills to augment weapon fire in a World War II short during high school. The Indiana native got a technical computer graphics degree from Purdue and made visual effects his day job, including an internship on “True Blood” and work on “Thor: Love and Thunder” and “Dune: Part Two.”

Directing, however, was always the goal and Evenson founded his Grimoire Horror YouTube channel in 2021, inspired by David F. Sandberg’s 2013 viral short “Lights Out” and his 2016 film version. “’It’s just the ultimate success story,” Evenson says. “A lot of us were like, ‘This is like a viable avenue to get our stuff seen and made.’ ”

With horror shorts, “you can just literally go out there with whatever idea,” Evenson adds, “and it’s the perfect proving grounds and R&D lab because you throw it out with no strings attached.”

Scary movie creators find new ways to market their films

Still, getting seen is key, and Evenson got some help from a fellow YouTube creator. CoryxKenshin featured Evenson’s horror shorts as part of his “Spooky Scary Sunday” video series, and Evenson’s subscriber base blew up from a couple hundred to 20,000 overnight. “From there, it’s like, ‘OK, now I have a built-in audience,’ ” Evenson says. “I can continue putting out these shorts and I won’t have to worry about getting completely lost in the algorithm.”

Phillips, 35, a Northern California native who once dreamed of being a cinematographer but fell in love with directing, made “Other Side of the Box” two years later for $3,000 with a small team of people, including his 14-year-old brother. He uploaded “Other Side of the Box” in 2020 right after the pandemic hit – TikTok was in its early days of popularity, YouTube was a way to get extra eyes on the short, and Phillips just hoped it would be shared. Views spiked when clips showed up on TikTok, and “I started to see how marketing was changing really rapidly because it could be done in a very grassroots way,” Phillips says.

“The thing people love the most outside of watching the movies is to talk about a movie,” he adds. “Having a forum literally attached to the video where people can discuss it makes it a much more enjoyable experience. And because horror lends itself to extreme moments and mystery lends itself to theories, there’s even more to discuss in those online spaces.”

Is YouTube horror another trend Hollywood will ruin?

There are fears in this potential new era of horror. Colangelo wrote on the movie site Slashfilm that the YouTube-to-Hollywood pipeline is yet another way the industry fails women directors and points out that YouTube is a platform that implicitly appeals to men.

“Treating an inherently inequitable platform like YouTube like the great savior of the industry is concerning because it’s a platform that mirrors the existing inequities in the film industry, but YouTube heightens it because it adds a layer of parasociality,” says Colangelo, a follower of the curated ALTER shorts channel, which introduced her to the work of Spanish director Carlota Pereda.

Also, Colangelo adds, “are we just going to exacerbate the growing problem of artists and creatives having to double as ‘influencers’ to gain followings for their art to be taken seriously by people in positions of power? Because that is an entirely different skill set and an unfair demand. Think of how many of our greatest filmmakers are painfully awkward introverts – they wouldn’t have survived this landscape.”

Even with the movie industry paying more attention, there are concerns among YouTube horror filmmakers as well.

A few years ago, in every single meeting Phillips would have with a studio, executives wanted to find the next “Barbarian,” “Weapons” director Zach Cregger’s surprise 2022 horror hit. “And I’m sitting there knowing everyone passed on ‘Barbarian.’ Like you would pass on ‘Barbarian,’ ” Phillips says. “It takes a very special producer to be able to get there first, and it usually comes from having really good taste and trusting a filmmaker with really good taste.”

He’s wary of any change or trend that feels like it’s coming from Hollywood and worries studios will learn the wrong lesson. “I just really balk at people trying to turn art into a science, and then hand out a rulebook to everyone who comes through the door on how you’re supposed to do it,” Phillips says. “Meanwhile, ‘Obsession’ was made without anyone knowing it was happening and then blew the doors off of every theater.

“A lot of very talented filmmakers who otherwise might not have been given a chance to break through are going to. I know every trend ends, and I want this to last a long time, because I think we’re going to get some amazing movies in the next three years,” adds Phillips, who’s a big fan of fellow online filmmaker Ethan Hunt and the horror animation of MeatCanyon.

Everybody loves scary movies online – even India

There doesn’t seem to be a generational gap when it comes to those interested in the new crop of filmmakers: While “younger people have always been the dominant ticket buyers for horror movies,” Colangelo says, “even older horror fans are excited to see where things are heading.”

Similarly, Evenson sees a broad audience interested in his horror shorts. His core demographics are, unsurprisingly, teens to people in their 30s, but he sees comments from middle-aged suburban moms and older men as well. “Also, a lot of people in India love YouTube horror,” he says. “I guess there are just a lot of people in India, so it could just be a numbers thing.”

It’s a modern audience watching, albeit in throwback fashion: Evenson, who enjoys the work of peers like Julian Terry and Aaron and Victoria Fradkin’s Social House Films, sees the sharing of horror shorts now like older generations watching R-rated “forbidden stuff” when they were kids. “There was almost a badge of honor to have watched it,” he says.

“Are all these people having those formative experiences with these shorts going to remember those shorts in the same way that I remember those movies?” he wonders. “Are we going to have adaptations of some of these shorts 10, 15 years down the line? Like when the 12-year-old who saw it is now an exec at Paramount, and they’re like, ‘Dude, we’re bringing this back.’ ”