When James Wan, the filmmaker behind “Insidious” and “Saw,” had his first Zoom meeting with Kane Parsons, the creator of the online phenom “Backrooms,” they were joined not by the YouTuber’s manager or agent, but by his dad.

“We didn’t realize until we reached out that Kane was still in high school,” Wan admits.

Parsons was only 16 at the time, but Wan believed that “Backrooms,” a series of “found footage” viral shorts the unfold in a warren of seemingly endless liminal spaces, had all the ingredients to make a compelling feature film.

“It felt unique. It felt different,” says Wan, who would go on to produce “Backrooms” through his company Blumhouse-Atomic Monster. “There was a vibe and a concept that seemed fresh.”

Wan’s confidence paid off. “Backrooms” opened last weekend to $81 million domestically and $118 million worldwide, an impressive result for a film that was produced for just $10 million. Its success extends a streak of hit films from directors like Curry Barker (“Obsession”), Danny and Michael Philippou (“Talk to Me”), and Mark Fischbach (“Iron Lung”), who got their starts on YouTube. Parsons, who is 20, became the youngest director in history to have a film top box office charts.

“The world is changing, and Hollywood needs to look to YouTube to find the young people who are coming up and have something to say,” says Kori Adelson, a producer on the film and president of North Road Films. “People like Kane grew up online and they’ve figured out how to get eyeballs on their work in a way that wasn’t possible for young filmmakers 20 years ago.”

YouTube isn’t the only online platform behind the success of “Backrooms,” which has a wide array of digital influences in its DNA. The film’s central concept of an extradimensional network of empty rooms originated on the imageboard website 4chan and was later picked up, and picked over, across Reddit forums. Parsons then turned the idea into 24 shorts, which attracted tens of millions of views and put him on Hollywood’s radar.

“Kane himself is a proxy for an entire online community,” says Michael Clear, a producer on the film and president of Atomic Monster. “‘Backrooms’ is an internet phenomenon more than it is a YouTube phenomenon.”

Parsons, who Adelson describes as “an old soul,” impressed producers with his vision for expanding the world of “Backrooms.” But he didn’t have any formal training. So Clear and Dan Cohen, a producer who had also spotted Parsons’ potential early, devised a plan to get him more comfortable behind the camera. They surrounded him with a network of mentors, like Wan and “Longlegs” filmmaker Osgood Perkins, who joined the movie as producers and “big brother” figures. To tease out the mystery of “Backroom,” the producers had Parsons come up with a two-page outline and met with a series of writers, before ultimately selecting Will Soodik, who had worked on “Homeland” and “Westworld,” to expand the story into a feature. They came up with the story of a troubled furniture salesman (Chiwetel Ejiofor) who discovers an infinite series of interconnected rooms that can be accessed in the basement of his store.

“The idea just got refined and refined,” Cohen says.

They also had Parsons shadow Bryce McGuire, the director of “Night Swim,” a horror film that Clear was producing.

“It had a similar budget range, and [McGuire] was also starting out as a director. So it felt like a one-to-one experience,” Cohen says.

But the film was shooting in Los Angeles and Parsons lived in Petaluma, a city in Northern California. Cohen was out of town to making a movie in Vancouver at the time, where he had relocated with his family, so he decided to have Parsons stay in his Westwood home.

“It was just sitting there, empty,” Cohen says. “I told my wife, ‘I’m trusting this kid to make a multi-million dollar movie, I can trust him to look after my house.'”

Parsons had made his shorts using Blender, a CGI software that’s open-sourced. When he made the transition to feature filmmaking, he had pre-visualized 90% of “Backrooms” with the technology before he shot a frame.

“It allowed us to stress-test everything ahead of time,” Adelson says. “That kept us on schedule. Kane didn’t go a day over. He made this movie on time and on budget.”

And though Parsons hadn’t ever worked with professional actors before, his command of the film’s mythology helped him make the transition from making movies in his backyard to working with Oscar nominees like Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve.

“He adapted quickly, and he had such a fluency with this world that people instantly got what he wanted,” says Cohen.

Because Parsons is so young, rumors cropped up online that he hadn’t actually directed “Backrooms.” Mark Duplass, who appears in the film, swatted away the gossip last week, tweeting that “Kane was 100% in control. More so than many directors 3x his age.” Cohen says the claims about Parsons are infuriating and false.

“Kane was the director of the movie — full stop,” Cohen says. “He was intricately involved in the development of the script and in every step of the movie’s production. It’s lunacy to suggest otherwise.”

The success of “Backrooms” and “Obsession” have Hollywood reconsidering how it finds and develops talent. And plenty of YouTubers will now have ambitions to become the next Kane Parsons or Curry Barker in the way that earlier generations of filmmakers wanted to be Steven Spielberg or Martin Scorsese. For companies like Blumhouse-Atomic Monster, there’s a sense that horror, the genre that it specializes in, is changing to accommodate new visions of what’s scary on screen.

“In a landscape of movies where things can feel overly predictable, filmmakers like Kane and Curry are doing something very different,” says Clear. “You watch those movies and you are taken on a ride, because you genuinely don’t know what to expect.”

For Adelson, the success of these YouTubers is a sign that Hollywood may be about to experience a youthquake, one that will see its old guard replaced by a rising group of auteurs.

“Hollywood should pay attention,” Adelson says. “Take risks. Be bold. Make choices that are driven by the audience, not by fear. Young people want to support young people, and these movies are connecting because they’re about young people. A lot of older people at studios are making greenlighting decisions, and they are disconnected from the audience. It’s really hard for them to understand what’s happening on the ground floor.”