The number is the story. A24's The Backrooms has grossed $277.4 million worldwide, the highest-grossing film in the studio's history. It opened in US theaters May 29, 2026.
It came straight out of analog horror.
Director Kane Parsons is now the youngest filmmaker to reach #1 at the US box office. The film holds 88% on Rotten Tomatoes across 272 reviews, average score 7.5/10.
One line on the genre: analog horror is a YouTube-native subgenre that mimics degraded VHS, emergency broadcasts, and analog-era TV to manufacture dread.
Parsons built The Backrooms as a web series first, on his channel Kane Pixels. The first video dropped January 7, 2022, pulled from the 2019 Backrooms creepypasta. It has since surpassed 197 million views. Four years later, it's A24's franchise crown.
The wire rundown
The movement runs deeper than one breakout. Local 58, from Kris Straub, is the origin point — it named the genre with the broadcast "ANALOG HORROR AT 476 MHz." The Mandela Catalogue, from Alex Kister, premiered August 2021 and built its terror on "alternates," entities that impersonate real people. The Walten Files, from Chilean animator Martin Walls, arrived summer 2021 as an FNAF-inspired thread of corrupted footage and missing-persons dread.
None of it was funded. None of it was greenlit. It was uploaded.
That's the shift studios are now chasing. The Backrooms proved a free YouTube series can convert into a quarter-billion-dollar theatrical run, and the development pipeline has turned toward the platform. Studios are mining YouTube for the genre's next auteur — the next creator with a six-figure subscriber base, a built-in mythology, and near-zero acquisition cost on the IP.
The math is brutal and obvious. The audience is pre-built. The proof of concept already has 197 million views before a single dollar of marketing. The mythology is written. And the creator works for a fraction of an established director's quote.
The Rotten Tomatoes critics' consensus put it this way: A startlingly assured feature debut from director Kane Parsons, Backrooms bends the liminal spaces that have haunted the internet for years into a horror film that's as mesmerizing as it is terrifying.
Analog horror started as a dare on a free platform. This decade, it became the most influential horror movement going — and now it's the one studios can't afford to ignore.
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