YouTube cinema and the horror of neglected commons

The Fridley-Theatres-owned Vista movie theater in Storm Lake has three screens. In any given week, they usually reserve these screens for the biggest and best blockbuster movies. This week, it’s running the arthouse flick “Backrooms,” and it’s making waves in Storm Lake.

“Backrooms has broken some of the norms we’re usually accustomed to,” said Russell Vannorsdel, the film buyer for Fridley Theaters. “What the industry is saying is that Backrooms and movies like Obsession, that are YouTube-creator based, have a base that people are familiar with and they want to be able to see them on the big screen.”

Vannorsdel’s comments confirmed my sneaking suspicion. A new wave of movies and TV shows rooted in the culture of my generation — a generation raised alongside the internet—is starting to break into traditional audience spheres and the reactions are overwhelmingly positive.

The Backrooms are a long-standing internet myth. 

In May 2019, a user on the anonymous imageboard website 4chan posted an image of a room with yellowing wallpaper, old carpets and harsh fluorescent lights “at maximum hum-buzz.” The image’s origin is debated, but it spread like wildfire.

Soon, users around the world took the image and began to build an infinite world of empty, unplaceable environments like abandoned malls, empty pools or deserted movie theaters. Places that should be filled with life, but instead, lie still.

This touches on a primal fear. Viewers are left questioning what went wrong before they entered the room. Where did everyone go?

This type of fear has only grown more potent in recent years as more spaces around us are emptied.

Throughout my lifetime, I’ve witnessed the world around me become prohibitively expensive. With fewer people spending continuously, businesses have become more skittish toward non-paying customers, forcing people to spend less time in physical commercial hubs or simply not leave their homes at all.

I watched underutilized spaces close throughout my childhood. By the time I was old enough to get my license, my local shopping mall was a shadow of its former self: Half-closed and silent. 

The community spaces that remained were decimated during the pandemic, and new habits formed to compensate for time spent apart.

The social America of our youth is a car’s ride away, and gas prices are higher than they’ve ever been. Our commercial hubs are stricken with the fear of breaking even. Automated cameras line our streets. Our natural lands are sold for pennies on the dollar to commercial developers, permanently fragmenting what little remains of the untouched world. 

The children of America can do little but watch what should have been their gathering places fade like a memory through their monitors. There’s horror in that for sure.

But a semblance of solace can be found in an online community. Streamers and YouTubers now fill a much-needed role as catalysts for community. Today’s stars are ordinary people who can curate and comment on the all-encompassing swell of a digital age.

They interact with fans and their content is beholden to the interests of the day. To maintain an audience, these micro-celebrities moderate chatrooms where people from around the world interact on common ground.

Fans of YouTuber Markiplier have countless stories of meeting friends, partners, gaming groups, creative collaborators and addiction support networks lasting years.

Markiplier was among the first of these creators to break into the movie-making space, with his breakout indie-horror flick “Iron Lung.” The film cost him $3 million to produce, earning a box office of $51 million worldwide, circumventing the traditional Hollywood process as a remarkable self-funded and self-distributed cinema success.

His success helped pave the way for an onslaught of extremely creative, YouTube-driven horror movies including Obsession, Exit 8 and most recently, Backrooms.

These content creators are uniquely positioned to take up the mantle of filmmaking for a younger generation, and Backrooms director Kane Parsons is no exception. Parsons made short films on The Backrooms for four years before his silver screen debut. 

When Parsons broke into the movie market, he had an audience of 2.4 million fans primed to show up to support his work. His movie and others like it explode partly because creators bring active global communities they remain uniquely connected to.

On his way into the Backrooms movie, Fonda resident Jeremy Sobkoweak, 20, said that YouTubers are beginning to realize “that their creativity is no longer in the bounds of playing these short indie games or even these big titles.”

“With so many years put into YouTube, editing, filming and getting to know their audience, I feel like their creativity is now able to evolve,” he said. 

Hopefully, the industry’s takeaway isn’t that every John Doe with a camera can create shoestring-budget blockbusters. Rather, I hope they learn that audiences are starved for truly unique creatives that can gracefully respond to a newly isolated public.