Before Curry Barker or Kane Parsons, There Was David F. Sandberg. Here’s His Advice

While Hollywood is abuzz this week over Kane Parsons’ “Backrooms” and Curry Barker’s “Obsession,” the YouTube-to-Big Screen pipeline is not as new as some might think. Just ask David F. Sandberg. It’s been a decade since the filmmaker from Jönköping, Sweden, whose filmography includes two “Shazam!” films with DC and an adaptation of the Playstation horror game “Until Dawn,” first came to America after “Lights Out,” a no-budget horror short he made for a film contest with his wife Lotta Losten, went viral on YouTube and Vimeo. The film attracted the attention of “The Conjuring” director and Atomic Monster co-founder James Wan, who worked with Sandberg to produce a feature-length version of the short. “We just made the film for the competition and moved on, and then I think the Vimeo version was shared on a Reddit page a couple months later and suddenly it was everywhere,” Sandberg told TheWrap. “At first it had 600 views, then we checked after that post and it had 17,000. We clicked ‘refresh’ and suddenly it had 70,000.” As of today, the “Lights Out” short has a combined 29 million views from YouTube and Vimeo. While YouTube’s role in the entertainment world has grown
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