Backrooms, Obsession, & the Rise of Gen Z Horror: Why Young Audiences Want New Nightmares
It goes without saying that the success of Backrooms and Obsession is the most significant movie story of the year. Depending on how things pan out, it could well prove to be the story of the decade: not an exception but the new, exciting rule.
Directed by two filmmakers who were more or less born in the 21st century—and who learned their trade not through film school but YouTube—these original movies cost a combined $11M to make and have so far raked in three-quarters of a billion $USD at the box office. They have also, at the time of writing, more than nudged their way into the top ten earners of 2026—a group that has been the sole domain of sequels, remakes and IP in the last decade.
What all this means—for Hollywood, horror, and the moviegoing experience itself—has been exciting the minds of movie fans and industry heads for weeks now. Let’s take a closer look at how we got here and how Gen Z maybe just became cinema’s unlikely saviour.
Backrooms, Obsession and the Gen Z Horror Boom
Kane Parsons and Curry Barker (the 20-something directors of Backrooms and Obsession) are rightly being celebrated across the board at the moment. Yet, for all their achievements, they can't exactly claim to be the originators of this trend.
In 2022, a millennial named Kyle Edward Ball took the most frequently recurring ideas from the stories submitted by fans to his horror YouTube channel and used them to create a micro-budgeted movie called Skinamarink. It took in $2M at the box office, which was roughly 140 times what it cost to make.
In terms of Gen Z short form video influencers, the first notable case of a switch to directing was Danny and Michael Philippou, two brothers from New Zealand who got famous online with their horror comedy YouTube channel RackaRacka before setting down a marker for the Parsons and Barkers of this world with Talk to Me—an A24 produced "monkey's paw" story about a cursed artefact that teens at parties use to commune with the dead.
The Philippous followed that up with the more mature (dare we say “elevated”) horror of Bring Her Back, but it was Zach Cregger’s Weapons (released on that very same weekend) that proved to be the next chapter in this tale. Admittedly, Cregger turned 45 in March, but his movie was still significant to the Gen Z boom as it felt like mainstream horror was finally waking up to the fact that audiences had grown a little tired of trauma stories and were ready to have some fun. It will be interesting to see how the wildly acclaimed upcoming movie Leviticus (which is being billed as It Follows meets Heated Rivalry, but which also has the sheen of “elevated” about it) will perform when it releases here later this year.
On the back of a brilliant marketing campaign, Gen Z viewers came out in droves to see Weapons, boosting its profile to no end by obsessing over it online (fan reaction videos have also been a major part of this story), planting the seed for what’s come since. Amy Madigan won an Oscar for her performance as Aunt Gladys. Is it really so crazy to think that Obsession breakout Inde Navarrette could do the same?
Why Is Gen Z Suddenly Flocking to the Cinema?
No one should be surprised to learn that the things being said and written about various generations and their supposed traits are anything but 'Hot'. Like Millennials and their insatiable appetite for avocado toast, we’ve been told for years that the last nails were being readied for the cinema coffin and that Gen Z was holding the hammer. Surely, they claimed, young people who spent their formative years in lockdown, glued to phone screens, and with every movie in existence at their beck and call, would find no need for or interest in the brick-and-mortar movie palaces of old? Think again.
Energised by the rise of Letterboxd and that platform's capacity for allowing people to showcase their taste and personality through the movies they watch, Gen Z has helped to rebrand movie fandom in the last few years; making it a little less introverted, a little less precious, and frankly a little more robust and cool—if Sophie Thatcher loves A Woman Under the Influence, it's probably worth taking the time to see.
Now, the numbers are finally here to back it up. As the BBC reported last month, Gen Z is watching more movies in cinemas than Boomers or Gen X in recent years. They’ve also clearly grown tired of being spoonfed Millennial-specific nostalgia—and that goes for superhero movies as much as it does for the likes of Masters of the Universe and Toy Story 5, both of which are based on characters that were created before Parsons and Barker were even born.
With their curiosity about online life and themes of isolation (Jane Schoenbrun's We're All Going to the World's Fair is another prime example), and the uncanny, video game-brained aesthetics of a movie like Backrooms, these horror movies are allowing Gen Z audiences not only the thrill of the collective experience of moviegoing (something horror gives you with more bang for your buck than any other genre) but also the opportunity to actually feel seen in a cinema. At the end of the day, that's kind of what it's all about.
The question shouldn’t really be why these two movies have been such a sensation. What we should really be asking is why it’s taken Hollywood so long to notice them.
