Over the weekend, audiences flocked to see Backrooms, the new horror movie from 20-year-old YouTube sensation Kane Parsons, whose $81 million domestic gross made him the youngest director in history to open a film at No. 1. But in keeping with the film’s fascination with eerie, depersonalized spaces, some intrepid viewers sought out the most abandoned-looking place they could find to watch it in: a movie theater. Based on the flood of social media posts depicting endless stretches of carpeted hallways bathed in sickly fluorescence, they had no trouble finding candidates. Where better to see a story about a faded reflection of a once populated place where everything feels slightly off and nothing works the way it should than in a contemporary multiplex?
Backrooms’ stunning opening, the biggest by far in the history of A24, overlaps with an even more unusual box-office phenomenon: the continuing growth of Curry Barker’s Obsession, which has become the first wide release in more than four decades to open to more than $10 million and increase its take for two consecutive weeks. (The previous movie to do it? E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.) Even more astonishingly, Barker’s debut, which cost a mere $750,000 to make, leapfrogged The Mandalorian and Grogu to come in second, putting two first films by directors in their 20s above a Star Wars movie. Given that Hollywood’s big hopes for the summer include a fifth Toy Story, a new Minions, and a live-action remake of Moana, the preference for the new over the familiar must have studios and theater chains wondering what they’ve been missing and if they’ve gotten it all wrong.
Neither movie’s success was entirely unexpected. Obsession was a smash at the Toronto International Film Festival, a big enough hit that Focus Features picked it up for $15 million (a number that, as the film’s global take approaches 10 times that sum, seems like an awfully smart investment), and both Barker and Parsons have substantial online followings. The YouTube channel where Barker and his friend Cooper Tomlinson post Tim Robinson–esque comedy sketches has more than 1.2 million followers (they’ve got even more on TikTok), and the short horror film Barker posted to the channel three years ago has been watched nearly 10 million times. And though Parsons was only 19 when he directed Backrooms, the movie is the culmination of a yearslong project, a series of short films that transformed a collective internet phenomenon into his own personal mythology. The most-watched of Parsons’ Backrooms videos has 81 million views.
It’s also not new for emerging creators to build a following online, and both Backrooms and Obsession had substantial help from more seasoned entities: Kane Parsons may be a newcomer, but his movie’s script is by Will Soodik, a veteran of TV shows like Westworld and Homeland whose credits go back more than a decade. But especially when combined with the $50 million global gross for Iron Lung, the self-financed and self-distributed feature debut of the YouTuber Markiplier, it sure seems as if there’s a shift underway, if not away from Hollywood’s reliance on known quantities—the top-grossing movie of the year is still Super Mario Galaxy—at least toward original stories by younger filmmakers and for younger audiences. An estimated 44 percent of Backrooms’ opening-weekend sales were to viewers under the age of 21.
The lessons here seem obvious, similar to the ones Hollywood was forced to learn in the late 1960s: Audiences will go to the movies if the movies give them a reason to go, and they are drawn to stories that reflect their own experience. Obsession’s characters are underemployed twentysomethings adrift in a world with few prospects, clinging to relationships (and magic wishing sticks) in a vain attempt to give themselves a sense of purpose. And though Backrooms’ protagonist, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, is a divorcé in his late 40s, he works a dead-end retail job because he’s never had a chance to pursue his real passion—or maybe just never managed to get up enough hope to try. The Backrooms themselves, an endless warren of dingy cubicles and misshapen furniture, feel like a child’s sketch of the adult world, constructed with no understanding of its true function—an office designed by someone who can dream only of working in one.
Horror is both a genre with historical appeal to younger audiences and one that has proved to be uniquely good at producing breakout word-of-mouth hits from first-time directors, like Zach Cregger’s Barbarian, which added hundreds of screens its third week in theaters. And it surely doesn’t hurt that Parsons and Barker are the kind of visionaries that Hollywood is best at recognizing, which is to say they’re young white men. (As some have pointed out, the horror boom skipped right past Aleshea Harris’ Is God Is, whose director is a 44-year-old Black woman.) But there’s no denying that their movies are connecting with an audience the industry has had an especially difficult time targeting—not just to get them to see a specific movie but to get them into theaters at all.
Or, at least, that’s been the conventional wisdom: Young people don’t go to the movies, and if they do, it’s to see a movie associated with some property they already feel a connection to—Minecraft, say, or a Disney animation from their childhood. But a few months ago, a study by the online ticketer Fandango concluded that Gen Z is now the most active moviegoing demographic, part of an overall rise that has made this the best year to date in the postpandemic era. It’s a safe bet that every development executive in Hollywood is spending the morning scouring the internet for the next Kane Parsons. But it’s worth noting that Obsession’s success story is a fairly traditional one: Indie film premieres at prestigious film festival, makes a splashy sale, and goes over big enough with regular audiences that they tell their friends they have to see it too. Barker’s online footprint, while significant, doesn’t come close to accounting for the movie’s theatrical audience. People saw a movie that they (and critics) loved—one that, crucially, didn’t feel as if it was being shoved down their throats by a marketing spend in the tens of millions—and wanted others to share that feeling with them.
Backrooms owes more to its internet prehistory. The concept of the Backrooms may not be intellectual property per se—for one thing, a collectively authored creepypasta doesn’t belong to any one person—but it comes with a built-in audience, one that’s already demonstrated its fondness for Parsons’ specific elaboration of the meme. And the movie’s B-minus CinemaScore, an indicator of lukewarm audience satisfaction, suggests that it may not stick around the way that Obsession did. (Barker’s movie received an A-minus.) So if the industry perceives this weekend’s box office as an inflection point, chances are good it’ll glom on to the part that’s least disruptive to its established practices: perhaps a broadened definition of what IP is or an understanding that the best way to develop that IP is to tap someone who’s already connected to it. (Remember Michael Bay’s Skibidi Toilet movie?)
But imagine if the industry learned more, particularly from Obsession. Barker’s movie feels in some ways like a novice filmmaker’s work, especially in its failure to fully grasp the implications of its own themes. (The movie can’t seem to decide if it wants to side with its protagonist, who gets way more than he bargains for when he wishes for the woman he loves to love him back, or with the young woman who is magically compelled to have sex with a man she doesn’t want to have sex with.) But its virtues are, in some ways, surprisingly old-fashioned. Barker takes his time setting up his characters, the lovelorn Bear (Michael Johnston) and his longtime crush Nikki (Inde Navarrette), and he’s not just killing time until the spooky stuff starts. The movie’s effectiveness is measured not in the goriness of its kills or the intensity of its jumpscares but in the dread that slowly seeps into its characters, as Bear starts to realize what he’s done and Nikki realizes how he’s locked her out of her own body. Online fans seem especially astonished at the way the film uses simple contouring makeup to make Navarrette’s face seem flat and inhuman in low light, a trick that goes all the way back to the silent-film era. (Backrooms too relies on largely practical effects, especially the physical construction of the architecturally impossible environments Parsons created in the open-source graphics program Blender.) In a medium full of digital effects so seamless they’re often impossible to spot, it’s striking to be reminded how effective, and distinctive, analog techniques can be.
Most importantly, though, Obsession and Backrooms are movies that reflect how young people see the world, in virtually the only mainstream genre where they’re allowed to express it. TV is full of shows about teens and twentysomethings, but there’s no zoomer equivalent of Reality Bites, a movie that seems, however imperfectly, to capture what it means to be a part of a certain generation. Or maybe Obsession, in its own way, does just that. It’s a movie about people who are told that they can have what they want if they just follow the rules—or, really, in this case, just rule—but find that playing the game only leaves them worse off than they were. When real life is a horror movie, maybe that’s the only way to go.
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