Did you go to the cinema this week? If you did, that rumbling you felt wasn’t down to those spicy nachos you ate. Well, it might have been – but equally, you may just have been experiencing the tectonic shift suddenly under way in Hollywood. This was the week that two twentysomething YouTubers took over the box office with their horror films, upending all the industry rules and preconceptions in the process.
At the top of the tree sits Kane Parsons, a 20-year-old phenom whose debut film, Backrooms – an A24 psychological chiller based on his own webseries, and inspired by a “creepypasta” horror story shared across the internet – has grossed a scarcely fathomable $140m worldwide in its first week. Just beneath Parsons, though a shade older at 26, is Curry Baker, a YouTube comic whose supernatural horror movie, Obsession, has enjoyed an almost unheard of week-on-week-on-week rise in ticket sales, and is on course to be one of the most profitable films of all time, having been made for a tiddly $750,000. That the pair have nudged Star Wars spin-off The Mandalorian and Grogu – a far more expensive movie that was expected to squat atop the box office for much of May and June – into third place only underscores what an unlikely cinematic revolution this is.
It’s inarguably an exciting moment, particularly given the long shadow of risk-averse, IP-worshipping blockbusters this new era is arriving out of. A new generation of film-makers, emerging from the internet armed with original ideas and able to work with tight budgets, are succeeding wildly, outside the studio system (to the list we should add YouTuber Mark Fischbach, who came close to topping the box office earlier this year with a film that, remarkably, he distributed himself). So it feels a little Scrooge-like to have a complaint about this thrilling moment for film – but I do have one, and it’s this: why does it always have to be horror? Is the only way of getting an original idea on to cinema screens via homicidal maniacs and final girls? Does the indie breakout hit I ordered really have to come with a mandatory side of severed head?
So much of the creative and commercial energy around modern film-making seems to be directed towards the horror genre. Ever since the emergence of what is either termed “elevated” or “post” horror around a decade ago, the coolest, buzziest films have tended to swim in those waters: Sinners; Weapons; Longlegs; the works of Jordan Peele; the works of Robert Eggers; the works of Ari Aster; the work of the Philippou brothers (another pair of YouTube graduates). You could extend this to TV, where the show of the moment, Widow’s Bay, is extremely horror-coded.
Meanwhile, commercially, it seems barely a month goes by without a horror film massively exceeding its budget and forging a new franchise in the process (Smile, The Black Phone, Terrifier). Indeed, it feels fairly surprising when an original hit non-blockbuster film isn’t a horror. (The most recent example is probably The Drama, which I’d argue was pretty horror-esque in the way it was sold to audiences: you need to find out what horrible thing this person did.) It’s fairly obvious why this is: horror films are relatively cheap, have built-in audiences and are particularly popular with the younger viewers the industry is so desperate to lure away from smaller screens and towards bigger ones. But is it a good thing?
OK, I’m a little biased here, as someone who doesn’t exactly race to the cinema to catch the latest slasher sensation. While I’ve loved individual horror films, I definitely wouldn’t consider myself a lover of the genre. That mass experience of collectively losing it in the cinema at a sudden jump-scare is something that, while I can definitely see the appeal of, has always left me a little cold: I’d much rather be surrounded by a sea of laughter, watching a hysterical comedy, than a sea of screams. And it probably doesn’t help that I’m a cowardly custard when it comes to extreme gore.
But, leaving aside my own squeamishness, I’m still not sure horror’s complete domination over non-blockbuster cinema is a healthy development for the industry. Other genres – comedies, crime dramas, weepies, non-blockbuster sci-fi – have largely been muscled out of the cinema and on to streaming, leaving variety sorely lacking. Do we really want just one (blood-orange) flavour of film available? And for all the invention being shown by this talented new generation of film-makers, the horror genre remains a restrictive one, the straitjacket of established beats and rhythms hard to escape. Even the greatest examples of the recent elevated horror boom will usually end with the familiar final chase scene and an unpleasant twist as the credits roll.
Perhaps that’s why many of the main artistic talents to emerge from the horror boom have either left the genre behind or bent it to their specifications: you seek out a Jordan Peele or Robert Eggers film rather than simply a horror film directed by Peele or Eggers. Hopefully, we will say the same of this new generation. With Backrooms, Parsons has made a film that reaches far beyond horror, with hints of David Lynch, Severance and the music videos of Chris Cunningham in its DNA, among many other things. It will be exciting to see what he comes up with next – especially if it isn’t a pure horror film. Could I recommend a mob drama, maybe?
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