Before the early aughts, “going viral” wasn’t a part of the public lexicon. The internet didn’t become widely available until the mid-90s. If you happened to miss out on the days of dial-up, be grateful. Logging on meant hearing what sounded like your computer screaming from the hell dimension. Seen Event Horizon? Kinda like that. Early social media like MySpace didn’t appear until 2003. YouTube would arrive a couple years later in 2005.
Budding filmmakers didn’t have nearly the tools they do now. If you wanted people to see your short film, you had to harass festivals until they accepted your movie. Kick down the doors of producers and beg them to watch your work before they threw you out. Now, success may be merely a click away. Post that short on YouTube. Create engaging TikTok videos. The potential possibilities for going viral and getting a feature film deal out of it are endless.
In honor of Dread’s new horror movie, The Jester 2, coming to theaters on September 15th & 16th, you’ll find a list of ten unmissable feature films that spawned from viral origins. They range from indies to major franchise films and everything in-between. But, they all have one thing in common. Each can be traced back to a horror short that made millions of fans scream online.
Evil Dead (2013)
By 2009, YouTube had only been around for a few years. The idea of getting filmmaking opportunities by going viral was still pretty new. Fede Álvarez showed what was possible with his short film, Panic Attack!. A VFX spectacle about a city witnessing the invasion of giant robots, the short became so popular that it caught the attention of Evil Dead creator, Sam Raimi. He and producer Rob Tapert decided to hand over the Necronomicon, hiring Álvarez to direct the Evil Dead (2013) requel for their Ghost House Pictures label. Talk about the job of a lifetime.
What’s interesting is that Panic Attack! doesn’t feature the excessive gore or grizzly nastiness that Álvarez would bring to his Evil Dead and future works. But Raimi and Tapert saw in his short an innovative young filmmaker that could deliver on big concepts with a small budget. His take on Evil Dead flipped the narrative in exciting ways, full of twists, screams, and deadite carnage. Álvarez proved doubters wrong and then some with his bloody crowdpleaser.
Lights Out
Not long after Fede Álvarez’s success came David F. Sandberg. The now quite successful filmmaker began his career by making horror shorts with his wife in their apartment that they would release on YouTube. In 2013, they hit the bloody jackpot with their supernatural tale, Lights Out. Running at just under three minutes, the short features Sandberg’s wife, Lotta Losten, as a woman haunted by a presence kept away from her only by light. It culminates in a scream of a jumpscare that got people talking and eventually led to a feature-length adaptation of the same name.
Released in 2016, Lights Out follows a similar premise to the short, but with a story that’s a little more fleshed out than “woman walks around apartment”. The film did gangbusters at the box office, leading to a career that has seen Sandberg tackle Annabelle: Creation, Shazam! and this year’s adaptation of video game hit, Until Dawn.
Talk to Me
Before the Philippou brothers shocked us all with their 2023 hit, Talk to Me, they had a YouTube channel dubbed RackaRacka. And it might just be one of my favorite channels ever. The RackaRacka series consists of various shorts featuring wild stunts and extreme gore. What’s really surprising if you’re only familiar with the duo’s feature films is just how goddamn funny these shorts are. Whether it’s Ronald McDonald losing his mind or an argument over Mortal Kombat fatalities gone insane, the Philippou’s fill their films with gut-busting humor.
However, as many of you know, their feature films couldn’t be more different in tone. Talk to Me delves into an exciting concept in which a group of teens discover a severed hand that can connect them to the spirit world. Teens are going to teen, so they concoct a party game around it. What do you know, it doesn’t go well for them. While the film does involve grotesque gore, it takes a much more serious approach than the duo had been known for. Talk to Me reaches gutting emotional levels that helped make it one of the most talked about films of 2023.
Skinamarink
Kyle Edward Ball’s Skinamarink was one of my favorite horror films of 2023. A lo-fi nightmare in which a pair of kids wander a transforming home haunted by a dark presence, the film catapults audiences back to a time when we believed in the boogeyman. Some criticized it as being nothing but shots of walls. I’d argue that’s a rather shallow criticism of a liminal horror masterpiece operating on deeper levels than that.
Before Skinamarink, Ball debuted the short Heck on his YouTube channel, Bitesized Nightmares. Itself a lo-fi nightmare, it was a pre-cursor to what Ball would expand on in Skinamarink. The viral story of this film is a bit of a glass half full tale, though. During its festival run, Ball’s movie was leaked on TikTok. I could yell all day about how cruel and thoughtless it is to leak a filmmaker’s hard work like that. Please, do not do this, people. That said, it all worked out for Ball, as IFC Midnight and Shudder decided to accelerate the release plans and hop on the viral trend. Word of mouth helped propel Skinamarink to box office success, turning the viral leak into a blessing in disguise.
House on Eden
There are still plenty of budding filmmakers getting their start on YouTube, but TikTok has entered the chat over the last few years. One recent success in horror comes in House of Eden, written/directed by Kris Collins and starring Collins and collaborator, Celina Myers. If you’re unfamiliar with the two, they’re both TikTokers who have gained an enormous following over the years. Their videos range from comedy skits to your average life updates. But it’s their paranormal investigations that led to House on Eden.
In the film, the duo (playing themselves)—along with Jason-Christopher Mayer, aka “Jay”—arrive at a supposedly haunted house where they plan on doing their next investigation. Turns out, the ghosts have other plans. While I’m not personally a fan of the film itself, I can’t help but admire filmmakers who went from goofy little paranormal investigation videos to landing a feature film in theaters released by RLJE Films and Shudder. If you’re a TikToker, keep on posting those shorts. You never know.
Obsession
Writer/director/actor Curry Baker has been posting videos through his YouTube channel That’s a Bad Idea for a few years now. It was last year’s Milk & Serial, however, that finally garnered the filmmaker the attention he deserves. A found-footage horror film that follows a prankster serial killer, word of the disturbing “short”—it runs just over an hour—spread like wildfire through social media. The film’s viral success led Baker to his first full-length feature, Obsession, which just had its World Premiere at TIFF.
Obsession tells a familiar tale of a hopeless romantic whose wish for the love of his crush goes wrong and tosses him into a dark world of horror. I have yet to see the film myself, but I’m a sucker for stories like this…especially from such a promising filmmaker. In his review, Dread’s own Josh Korngut labeled the film, “the Next-Gen horror masterpiece I wasn’t prepared for”. That’s some high praise for what sounds like another tale from Curry that’ll have audiences screaming.
Shelby Oaks
Releasing this October through Neon is the hotly anticipated Shelby Oaks. The film derives from filmmaker Chris Stuckmann, who found success on his YouTube channel as one of the site’s most popular film critics. After years of critiquing films, Chris finally got a chance to make his own feature after singing a deal with Paper Street Pictures and producer Aaron B. Koontz (one of the creators behind Scare Package). A kickstarter campaign was introduced to raise funds for the film, becoming the highest funded Kickstarter horror film ever. No small feat. It even caught the eye of none other than Mike Flanagan, who put his name behind the film as an executive producer.
Shelby Oaks centers around a woman and her desperate search for her sister who disappeared years ago. That search leads to the realization that a demon from their childhood may not have been just a figment of their imaginations. At Dread, we listed Shelby Oaks as one of our most anticipated horror films closing out the year. October can’t get here soon enough.
The Backrooms
Many of you are probably aware of the Backrooms creepypasta that began as an image of a carpeted room and fluorescent lights. That image went on to inspire a 4chan thread where the idea of the “backrooms” was applied by an anonymous user. Since then, the backrooms have become one of the most popular examples of liminal horror. The concept suggests a space accessed by “no-clipping” out of reality and into a maze realm composed of eerie, empty rooms. Loads of short films, games and written stories have been released around the concept. What you may not be aware of, however, is the Backrooms short film series developed by YouTuber Kane Parsons.
The series first debuted in 2022 on Parsons YouTube channel, Kane Pixels. It quickly took the internet by storm, resulting in a feature film adaptation currently in development from A24. And the real kicker? Parsons was just seventeen-years-old when the deal was signed. While plot details are being kept under wraps, Parson’s series followed a filmmaker’s descent into the fluorescent hell occupied by strange, roaming creatures. Liminal horror is all the rage right now, and I imagine Parson’s Backrooms is only going to fuel that fire.
Die’ced: Reloaded
Through Epic Pictures Group Dread label, we at DC are proud to be behind bringing exciting indie filmmakers into the spotlight. One such filmmaker is Jeremy Rudd, whose short film Die’ced cut into the hearts of audiences and gained overwhelming interest. About a killer who dresses up like a scarecrow and wreaks havoc on Halloween night, the viral sensation was picked up by Dread and made into an expanded feature dubbed Die’ced: Reloaded.
Slicing and dicing his way through 1980s Seattle on Halloween, what has perhaps allowed Benny to grab the attention of horror fans are his similarities to other genre favorites…namely, Art the Clown from Terrifier. Rudd has stated as much, claiming that Art played a heavy role in inspiring Benny. A crazed scarecrow who enjoys toying with his victims, you can certainly sense Benny’s mime-ing of the wildly popular killer clown. Art may have lit the torch for a new generation of gruesome killers, but Benny is yet another success story that has continued to carry that flame.
The Jester 2
Rounding out this list of must-see modern horror with viral origins is Dread’s very own The Jester 2. Scary and unrelenting, the YouTube origins of Dread’s The Jester franchise caught the attention of Epic Pictures and led to the first killer feature film adaptation two years ago. Now, bigger and badder than before, The Jester 2 holds a similar vibe to its predecessors, this time pitting a teen magician against the murderous, iconic trickster.
A sequel to 2023’s The Jester from director Colin Krawchuk, this entire franchise concerns a malevolent entity known as The Jester who terrorizes his victims on Halloween with uniquely theatrical violence (nice). He first appeared, of course, back in October of 2016 when the filmmaker released a short of the same name on Youtube. In that version, a man stumbles onto what may be the evil embodiment of Halloween itself.
If there’s anything to learn from this list, it’s that anything is possible for budding horror filmmakers. All of these filmmakers come from different backgrounds with a varying array of talents. The one thing they all have in common is that they were willing to pick up a camera, make that thing and put it out there for the world to see. May they be an inspiration to every one of you with dreams of terrifying audiences.
So, grab that camera and go, because you never know what can happen. And don’t miss The Jester 2 when it hits theaters on September 15th & 16th.
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