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In a session titled “The Theatrical Box Office Resurgence! How to Get Audiences’ Attention in the Era of Social Media and Online Platforms?”, Backrooms filmmaker Kane Parsons was joined by Academy CEO Bill Kramer, President and chief content officer at Mattel, Robbie Brenner and co-president at Sony Pictures Classics, Michael Barker.

Parsons actually confessed he doesn’t think of A24’s Backrooms, starring Renate Reinsve and Chiwetel Ejiofor, as a traditional horror film. “I didn’t direct it like a horror film. I don’t view it as a horror project. I think that’s just naturally the path of least resistance from a marketing perspective, and it’s what seems comfortable to people as a framing device,” he said. “But I’m going to try to stay as oblivious to those labels as possible, and just focus on [what] think I have greater control now with future projects, so those sort of structures [should] probably be a little less forceful, I think.”

He also explained, when asked about how A24 tried to sculpt the marketing and distribution plan for the film, that he believed there wasn’t “a real sense of what it would be prior to the actual release of the film. […] I don’t think there [was] a feeling for what this would really be tapping into with people […], all these people who were familiar with [Parsons’ YouTube series] the Backrooms for years in some vague way. Suddenly, as soon as a trailer [came] out, it just activated a desire to see: ‘How did Hollywood mess this up?'” he remembers thinking. “Or it [was] just a curiosity, at the very least. And I like to think we did the core idea that they were familiar with justice.”

Justice might be an understatement — the film went on to generate an eye-watering $401 million at the global box office upon its May release. During the panel in Zurich, Backrooms‘ success was cited as a prime example of a younger generation’s desire to go to the movies.

“There’s an appetite,” said Parsons, “[of] Backrooms being a pre-existing but decentralized IP presence online. I think people are just looking for that newness, [a] detachment from more cyclical cultural icons that keep eating themselves,” he said about Hollywood’s tendency to churn out projects rooted in overworked IP.

Kramer chimed in to say that he didn’t realise YouTube and movie-going were so well-connected, “in a way that I don’t think we thought was possible. That for me was a big takeaway of this summer,” continued the AMPAS CEO, “and it gives me great hope for the film industry because […] we’re seeing young people come back to the movies, and that’s really key.” He explained: “More than half of our ticket buyers [at the Academy Museum] are under the age of 40, and we sell out every screen. So people love seeing movies in movie theaters. We just needed to attract new fans, and you helped do that, this summer,” Kramer said to Parsons.

Parsons concurred. “I think the notion that people around my age gravitate towards short-form material is…,” said Parsons, before Kramer added: “Reductive.” The young director agreed. “Yeah, it’s reductive. I hear that come up a fair bit. [It might be] statistically truthful, but I feel like the sentiment is more that [short-form content] is weaponized, algorithmically incentivized, and it’s not really something I think most people enjoy about their own wiring. They don’t love that their attention spans are being sucked into the spiral of mostly consuming stuff that is that short.”

Backrooms follows therapist Dr. Mary Kline (Reinsve), who enters an alternate dimension after her patient disappears inside it. The film adapts Parsons’ viral YouTube series, which he launched as a teenager.

However, Parsons was understandably coy about the prospect of a sequel on Saturday, simply telling Zurich: “We’ll see.”

The 22nd Zurich Film Festival runs Sept. 24-Oct. 4.