SPOILERS FOR OBSESSION, LONGLEGS, AND BACKROOMS AHEAD
Ten years ago, The Angry Birds Movie and Captain America: Civil War were dominating the domestic box office. Summer 2026, meanwhile, has closed out a spectacular May at the box office with audiences embracing warped R-rated horror. Movies costing under $15 million made outside the major studio system, like Backrooms and Obsession, have dominated multiplexes. No Marvel title kicking off the summer? No problem. Freaky Nikki is apparently what audiences want and need. Not even a new Star Wars title could hope to compete with these projects that gave younger audiences original and non-sequel stories that belonged to them.
Backrooms and Obsession don't just signal how much of a box office juggernaut horror has become in the 2020s. These two titles reflect a new aesthetic dominating this decade's horror scene that's deeply relevant to today's younger audiences. Speaking from experience, the specific challenges facing the under-35 crowd rarely leave this population's mind. We're always making memes or trading bleak barbs about how "I'll never afford a house!" or panic attacks stemming from financial hardships. Inevitably, art that speaks to these challenges is going to be more relevant and captivating to Millennials and Gen-Z audiences than The Mandalorian and Grogu.
Before appreciating how Backrooms, Obsession, Longlegs, and other 2020s horror hits speak to the inescapable societal woes facing younger people, though, we have to go back in time a bit. Specifically, we have to look back at the aesthetics of mainstream 2010s horror and how much it sharply contrasts with this new era of scary cinema.
Remember The 2010s?
In the 2000s, the horror genre was largely dominated by remakes content to replay the hits of decades past. While some box office hits emerged during this time, largely, American horror garnered a reputation for just delivering worse versions of classics like A Nightmare on Elm Street or endless Saw sequels. As late as 2011, this genre only produced one movie (Paranormal Activity 3) that cleared $55+ million domestically. In just six years, though, this space was suddenly hopping again. Some of the year's biggest movies, namely Get Out and It, belonged to a domain that once seemed destined to only host Shark Night 3D. In the 2010s, the horror genre was "not dead, it's surely alive, living on the inside, roaring like a lion."
What kind of plots were driving this renaissance? Some of these titles inspiring the 2010s horror boom clearly paved the way for today's domination of indie horror. Chiefly, It Follows and The VVitch established that original and subversive scary films could leave an impact. Jordan Peele's first two masterpieces, Get Out and Us, delivered (among countless other virtues) distinctly modern recontextualizations of classic horror iconography (like slasher movie staples permeating Us). Some of the decade's biggest movies, though, were about preserving the status quo and protecting the nuclear family.
James Wan's The Conjuring films, specifically the mainline installments (spin-offs like The Nun and Annabelle: Creation differ a bit in this regard), each follow happy, unthreatening families who suddenly deal with demons plaguing their households. Only Ed (Patrick Wilson) and Lorraine Wilson (Vera Farmiga) can set things right. They must save these households whose lives have been profoundly disrupted. At the end of these titles, the status quo is restored, the families are all smiling again (albeit all of them needing some serious therapy now). These period piece films focus on people, much like the leads of classic horror fare like Poltergeist or The Amityville Horror, who can afford homes dealing with the capsizing of their lives. If only those clapping demons would leave, everything would be fine.
The two It movies also follow this mold. That's a weird element given how Stephen King's It novel emphasizes that the "normal" world the Loser's Club members inhabit is rotten to the core. The town of Derry itself is sick and intertwined with Pennywise's carnage. That's why it's eventually destroyed once Pennywise is defeated. In other words, there's so much more wrong with this world than just one cosmic being posing as a toothy clown.
Andy Muschietti's first It title hints at this element with fleeting elements like an adult Derry woman witnessing Billy's screams for help before abandoning him. However, the two films largely treat Pennywise as an abnormality whose cruelty isn't intertwined with Derry (the town no longer collapses when he's defeated) and isn't part of a larger cosmic mythology (thanks to the exclusion of Maturin the turtle). He's an anomaly whose defeat brings sunshine to Derry and psychological peace to the grown-up members of the Loser's Club. Take care of one "clown" and everything will be fine.
2010s horror tends to emphasize this storytelling approach, as seen by several other major movies from this decade, like Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. 2018's A Quiet Place can also be seen as adhering to this concept as its central family engages in a classical rural lifestyle whose only problem is those damn aliens with really sensitive hearing. There are no man-made horrors to suggest greater terrors beyond these otherworldly creatures. Even The Purge: Election Year ended on a hopeful note suggesting that the proper presidential candidate could basically wipe out all the bad people that supported the Purge*. The scares in these films are ingrained in deviations from the norm rather than society's status quo itself.
Now, this storytelling approach isn't exclusive to the Conjuring or It movies dominating 2010s horror. 2010s superhero films especially leaned on the idea that adjustments to the status quo were problems rather than toxic status quos themselves. It's also a concept that permeates many different genres across various eras of cinema history. Furthermore, some of these titles subverted this standard, including 2018's The First Purge, which revealed that the Purge violence came down to the U.S. government hiring Klansman and racists to stir up violence. In other words, the scares and villainy were coming from systemic forces, not abnormalities in American society.
Get Out's prologue alone also subverted this norm with a terrifying sequence where LaKeith Stanfield's character is kidnapped in a ritzy neighborhood dominated by white homeowners. Many other movies (of all genres) would use this backdrop to suggest "safety" compared to the "scary" city. Instead, Get Out uses this backdrop to immediately establish that violence against Black bodies can happen anywhere. That subversiveness isn't rampant, though, in titles like It: Chapter Two and the Conjuring films, which deploy fantasies for viewers wherein disruptions to the status quo can be controlled. The transphobic villain of something like Insidious: Chapter Two further reinforces the troubling nature of this trend.
Just as the horror zeitgeist swung from remakes towards Conjuring/Insidious movies, so too would 2010s horror have to give way to something new in the following decade. Now we're in an age of Obsession, Backrooms, and Longlegs.
"No, No, No, No, No, NOOOO, Don't Do That!'
Obsession is a great case study of this. Baron "Bear" Bailey's (Michael Johnston) first scene in the film is him opening up his heart to...a waitress, standing in for his crush Nikki Freeman (Inde Navarrette). From the get-go, Bear is only using women around him, even complete strangers, as objects for his own use. Long before the fantastical One Wish Willow enters the equation, Bear is already chilling. Once Nikki is trapped by Bear's wish, she provides many unsettling moments rooted in iconic physicality (Navarrette really is amazing in this role). However, it's telling that the most frightening line of the film is Bear, upon hearing the real Nikki beg to be freed from this Hell, pouting and remarking, "is it really so bad to date me?" His feelings are still paramount even when another human being is suffering because of his actions.
This line is a direct extension of Bear's behavior in that diner-set prologue and all his pre-One Wish Willow actions. Take away the fantastical wish element and Bear is still terrifying. Obsession's world is just varying degrees of terrifying rather than perfectly tranquil until a hungry clown or nun-resembling demon shows up.
Similarly, Backrooms chronicles furniture store owner Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve) having tormented lives long before they discover the titular isolated domain. Though the "real world" in Backrooms is one littered with orange-colored doors and bright blue walls, it's one where Clark is already wrapped up in a martyr complex, and Kline lives in the shadow of childhood trauma. The haunting, vacant sights in the Backrooms exacerbate and play on their memories. However, they don't suddenly upend cheerful lives. There's already terror and unease in this world (like Clark getting too aggressive in a role-play exercise with Kline) before the centerpiece of all those YouTube videos and creepypastas materializes.
Even Skinamarink is an extension of this phenomenon. Director Kyle Edward Ball's uber-low budget horror film chronicles a darkened house suddenly taken over by evil paranormal forces. There are no "safe" domiciles in this house. Nor can the child protaganists turn to their parents for help. This bleak exercise's methodical pace and quiet atmosphere imbue uncertainty-informed terror into even the most subdued images. It's a visual extension of young people never evading the economic hardships breathing down on them at all at times.
As the film goes on, entities that could help the adolescent leads, like windows, vanish. This functions as a parallel for Baby Boomers and other older generations taking away a survivable climate or functioning economy from Millennial, Gen-Z, and Gen-Alpha denizens. Similarly, the intentionally fuzzy 140p imagery simulates the lack of clarity these younger souls have about their future. The crumbling towns housing Longlegs, Weapons, and Obsession's respective narratives have been distilled into one nightmare house for Skinamarink.
These films continue a long-standing trend in horror of chillingly depicting how our greatest scares lie in the everyday world. Night of the Living Dead, for instance, had a gut-punch ending hauntingly depicting that, for Black people, the only thing deadlier than zombies was white people with guns. John Carpenter's The Thing played on the "lone wolf" tendencies of classical masculinity to portray an all-male Arctic camp succumbing to paranoia and distrust once a shape-shifting alien lands in their midst. These guys couldn't trust each other in the best of circumstances. The worst of times only amplifies their problems. On and on the classic examples go. Longlegs, Obsession, and Backrooms play on this sterling legacy.
Something specific to at least the two films dominating May 2026's box office, though, is how they reflect the economic anguish of young people in the mid-2020s. Just making rent or finding any monetary stability provides endless nightmares for folks under 35. That reality wasn't quite reflected in the last era of horror cinema. The characters in 2010s horror fare (like those families disrupted by demons in the Conjuring movies) could afford homes. Meanwhile, Obsession's lead characters are poor twenty-something living in a run-down American town, struggling to get into any college. Part of what makes Obsession's world intrinsically scary from the get-go is the deeply realistic economic hopelessness permeating characters like Sarah Harper (Megan Lawless).
Though a period piece in 1990, Backrooms also taps into this inescapable reality for Gen-Z folks. Amazing writer Michelle Kisner explained how Backrooms is relevant to young people far better than I ever could, so I'll just quote a Facebook post of hers:
Liminal horror is basically fear of purgatory, of the in-between. It’s unstable and unmoored, and possibly goes on for infinity. There’s actually a term for fear of infinity: apeirophobia. The human mind craves closure and I think that’s the main existential horror at play in the Backrooms. The ambiguity around why it exists is what makes it scary. The fact that much of the Backrooms looks like an abandoned office building is purposeful, it’s endless work with no reward. Clark is trapped in a capitalism loop where no matter how hard he works he never gains any ground, he just gets older. That’s the fear; you don’t amount to anything then you die. The Backrooms are corrupted nostalgia, and every new level is a further abstraction of the one before it.
The *why* of the Backrooms does not matter. Gen Z horror is being stuck in a place where everything has already been sucked dry and there is no way out, only more doors that lead nowhere. They are just left with piles of useless junk.
Don't Fear The Reaper...Or Social Relevance
"Possibly [going] on for infinity" is an apt way to describe the aesthetics of this new age of horror films. Even the works of Zach Cregger are very much a part of this phenomenon. Barbarian, for instance, features a non-linear, expansive narrative reflecting how men who dehumanize women materialize in many forms across multiple decades. Weapons, meanwhile, immediately wrings immense horror out of the phenomenon of people seeking out a vulnerable scapegoat. Aunt Gladys's (Amy Madigan) wickedness causes those kids to vanish. However, the long-simmering hostility these townspeople had to Justin Gandy (Julia Garner) makes it clear that problems existed in this domain long before that fateful day at 2:17 AM when a bunch of third-graders vanished.
The horrors are everywhere. They are inescapable. They're as vast as either the Backrooms or a town's desire to blame vulnerable people (like innocent women or addicts) when things go haywire.
Granted, the 2010s approach to horror isn't dead. The Conjuring: Last Rites and its more finite vision of frights still made a killing at the box office in 2025. Horror, like any healthy genre, can sustain countless forms and aesthetics, justl ike how stage musicals can house Titanique and A Strange Loop. However, the immense popularity of these 2020s horror movies shows that entertaining frights can flourish within bleak aesthetics, working-class backdrops, and socially conscious narratives. Whether intentionally or not, these projects touch on vibrantly relevant material to Gen-Z and Millennial audiences.
Chiefly, they're unafraid to tackle the horrors of everyday men or the lack of economic options for today's young people. Even period pieces Longlegs and Backrooms occupy dreary visions of America, encapsulating the dearth of opportunities afforded to these generations. We're all living in Clark's desolate furniture store or hoping for one college acceptance letter that might finally improve existence a touch. Just like 50s horror (such as Them!) reflected Atomic Age anxieties and the pervasiveness of 2000s torture horror helped normalize (and occasionally tried commenting on) America's use of torture in the Iraq War, these 2020s horror films navigate a late-capitalism tableau full of endless worries and men (not just in Barbarian and Obsession) feeling entitled to women's bodies.
So often, today's folks under 35 (myself included) can feel like Dr. Kline wandering the Backrooms or Nikki crying out for help in her own body; lost, scared, and confronting a ceaseless void. The world is populated by obstacles as inexplicable as that Longlegs killer or whatever new room the Backrooms conjure up. Some of the most popular horror movies defining 2020s cinema reflect that status quo to chilling (and often absorbingly entertaining) effect.
* = Amusingly, 2021's The Forever Purge would somewhat retcon this by revealing that this lady POTUS didn't stay in office for long and soon things reverted to grisly Purge chaos.
