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In the span of two weeks this past May, two very different films arrived to upend the notion of will or won’t play big with multiplex audiences. One concerns a romantic dream come true that becomes a bit of a nightmare. The other turns an industrial office space into an infinite realm of psychic dread. Both movies slot nicely into the category of “modern horror.” Both take familiar genre ideas and infuse them with a gonzo Gen-Z sensibility. And both were made on modest budgets by filmmakers under 30 who built fanbases via YouTube channels. Each of these titles have broken records for their respective studios. In space, no one can hear you scream. Online, however, the ability to make people scream and get their skin crawling is translating to box-office numbers — and that’s now making Hollywood sit up and listen.
Obsession, made by 26-year-old Curry Barker, drops you into a scenario straight out of Romcomville, USA: Bear (Michael Johnston) pines for his female co-worker Nikki (Inde Navarette). He thinks she’s the love of his life. She most likely thinks he’s friend-zone material, although their interactions do seem a little flirty. On the day he plans to finally ask Nikki out on a proper date, Bear happens to pick up a novelty item at a curio shop — something called a “One Wish Willow,” which promises that if you break this so-called magical stick and make a wish, it will come true. Presented with an opportunity to finally confess his feelings to Nikki, our man screws the metaphorical pooch. So, out of sheer frustration, he cracks the willow in half and wishes that his crush loved him more than anyone else in the whole world. The spell works not wisely but far, far too well.
The scenario is an old-fashioned when-you-wish-upon-a-monkey’s-paw chestnut, the kind that’s been fertile ground for everybody from Stephen King to The Simpsons. (In fact, it was a Simpsons episode playing on W.W. Jacobs’ 1902 short story about a severed simian hand with supernatural powers that inspired Barker here.) The tone goes from slow-burn dread to full-on madness, escalating in a way that pays off beautifully. Other than Andy Richter, who has a small supporting part as a shop owner, the cast is made up of virtual unknowns — though Navarette, who plays the possessed young woman with a commitment that borders on obsessiveness in and of itself, will likely find herself leveling up in terms of professional opportunities.
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As for Barker, his career has already gone from zero to 60. Like several prominent filmmakers working in the horror space (notably Get Out auteur Jordan Peele and Weapons’ Zach Cregger), he started out as a sketch comedian before parlaying his skills to attract online audiences. After Obsession premiered at the Midnight Madness section of the Toronto International Film Festival in 2025, it sparked an all-out bidding war. Focus Features picked up the movie for a reported $15 million. It opened in third place and, against all industry logic, saw its box-office take go up nearly 40 percent (!) in its second weekend, a virtually unheard-of jump. And it might have been the Number One movie in the country had another, equally scrappy horror film not come nipping at its heels.
Backrooms is the brainchild of Kane Parsons, a 21-year-old from the Bay Area who’d been dropping a series of faux-found-footage clips online, centered around a cryptic institute studying mysterious, physics-defying spaces known as “the backrooms.” Those shorts — a subgenre of user-generated horror fiction known as creepypasta — attracted the attention of several genre-friendly gatekeepers, tastemakers, and, crucially, A24. The hipster-cool studio expressed interest in using those viral fragments as the basis of a long-form project, and the kid known as @KanePixels suddenly found himself with a lucrative deal.
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Parsons’ feature debut builds a woozy, minimalist mythology out of his shorts. The story follows Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a manager at a Silicon Valley furniture emporium. Late one night, Clark spies what appears to be a sliver of light coming through a crack in the wall of the store’s basement. Even odder: He’s able to simply walk right through the wall, and finds himself exploring an endless series of hallways, corridors, and oddly shaped subterranean nooks. He mentions it to his therapist, Mary (Sentimental Value’s Renate Reinsve), who thinks Clark is having a breakdown.
Then Clark suddenly goes missing. Mary goes to the store, which appears to be abandoned. She, too, discovers those multiplying backrooms of the title. Down the rabbit hole she goes. And then some seriously weird shit starts to happen.
As of this writing, Backrooms has made more than $200 million globally, overtaking Marty Supreme as A24’s highest-grossing film ever. Obsession has earned the distinction of becoming Focus Features’ biggest hit to date as well. The fact that these two movies were released within a week of each other was pure coincidence, though both of them hitting theaters right around the time college students were finishing up finals feels like No-Brainers 101. And the one-two punch of these comparatively low-budget horror movies wiping the floor with their IP-heavy competition (The Mandalorian and Grogu, Masters of the Universe) over several early-summer weekends is the development that’s now sparked a million think pieces.
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The question now is: Are we at the beginning of a Gen Z horror renaissance, one fueled by a perfect storm of young talent, new tech, online fanbases, and a creator-friendly platform that’s capable of bypassing traditional routes and going straight for millions of eyeballs? Or is this merely the crest of a wave that’s been building for a long while now? New Zealand filmmakers Danny and Michael Philippou — twins better known by their nom de YouTube RackkaRackka, where their violent, nutso videos were embraced by millions of viewers — became indie darlings thanks to their 2022 hit for A24, Talk to Me. Hawaiian actor turned content creator Mark Fischbach, a.k.a. Markiplier, turned his self-released video-game adaptation Iron Lung into one of this year’s biggest return-on-investment hits. (Budget: $3 million. Box office: $51.2 million.) Though both the Philippou brothers and Fischbach are in their thirties, they navigated the internet networks in a way that showed a younger generation how you could translate digital fanbases into IRL moviegoing audiences. Not to mention that younger film fans — the kind who’ve made A24 a brand-name colossus among film nerds and crashed websites during advance ticketing for 70mm screenings of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey — now have the sort of collective purchasing pull that allows them to speak truth to box-office power.
Yes, this could be a fad — just a flavor-of-the-month anomaly before the next glut of I.P. blockbusters hit theaters like a seasonal plague of locusts. But both Obsession and Backrooms have benefited from alternative creative pipelines, organic word-of-mouth campaigns, and an overall sense of franchise fatigue that has the 18-to-28 demographic looking for other ways to entertain themselves. Your mileage on these movies may vary, but you can’t deny that they’re defining a certain moviegoing experience right now. The question is whether this moment is going to evolve into a bona fide movement. We’d bet a supply of cursed monkeys’ paws that the answer is yes. Somewhere out there, a teenager with a Blender creation suite and a dream is hoping to become the next big thing. It’s never been a better time to make that wish come true.