Horror Hits ‘Obsession’ and ‘Backrooms’ Have Audiences Asking: What Is Gen Z So Afraid Of?

Members of Gen-Z haven’t just dominated the most frequent moviegoing demographic; now, naturally, they’re starting to actually make the movies bringing younger filmgoers out in droves. There’s no more bracing example than this past weekend, when the box office was topped by Backrooms and Obsession, two horror movies made by twentysomethings – and arguably for twentysomethings, too. They both beat back the second-weekend grosses for a new entry in the legacy franchise Star Wars, which now seems most attractive to aging Gen-Xers and some Gen Alpha kids who delight at the antics of Baby Yoda.

So far, there’s been relatively little sign of what an intensely zoomer-driven sci-fi/fantasy movie might look like; Hollywood is still handing those to properties that peaked nearly half a century ago. But horror, often with lower budgets and profiles than more star-centric or effects-driven vehicles, can move faster and with greater agility than many other genres, so it’s no surprise that it’s the first area where this generation has been able to make a real mark. It also means that the prevalence of twentysomethings in the space is as much an economic reality as anything else; it wouldn’t be American horror cinema if there wasn’t some element of mercenary profit-boosting!

At the same time, it’s worth digging into what these very mid-2020s movies reflect about the younger voices that inform them.

Backrooms has gotten more attention for being a particularly youthful phenomenon, given its origins not just as a YouTube series from director Kane Parsons but, essentially, a picture on a message board — one of those mysterious online time capsules of a moment no one would have thought likely to be preserved. Critic Carol Grant has written about the movie fitting a particular post-pandemic psychology of a generation that spent a significant chunk of its formative years in various forms of confinement. She describes it as a movie grappling with the feelings of looking at abandoned public spaces, as well as one that feeds on paranoia about the dangers of unruly “outside” spaces.

Maybe that accounts for the movie’s resonance – and some of its clunky weirdness, too. The characters in the movie are established adults living in 1990, rather than teenagers or young adults living in 2026, and not always convincingly so. Even when they’re given motivating backstories, the characters feel limited in a way that doesn’t sync up with their ages or professions. They’re only slightly less composited than the eerie copy-of-a-copy mutations imitating the human form throughout the mysterious backrooms zone. It may undermine the movie’s drama in the moment, yet it does track with post-pandemic ennui. The characters lose themselves in the backrooms in part because their sense of self wavers. There aren’t jobs or familial connections or relationships to keep them from poking around in a weird purgatory, just bad memories that fuel their restless dissatisfaction. In that sense, it’s a very Gen-Z view of what adult life might look like, especially if spun out from the pandemic experience.

Obsession is more of a classic wish-gone-wrong story, and as such will be more immediately relatable to some older audiences. Yet it also has some connection to the growing pains of an intensely online, socially isolated time. The characters in the movie go through familiar young-adult rituals: They’re working jobs without much obvious future, going to bar trivia nights together, forming high school-ish crushes. (Some of them are actually former classmates.) See plenty of later-period Hold Steady songs for more examples of this. (The movie even has some oxy lying around.) Yet Bear (Michael Johnston) seems downright paralyzed by the merest hints of acting on his feelings for Nikki (Inde Navarrette) in a way that’s more reminiscent of middle school. No wonder he makes a wish on an old novelty toy rather than confessing his feelings. The wish feels safer than the real possibility that Nikki doesn’t reciprocate his devotion.

Writer-director Curry Barker isn’t necessarily making a statement about his generation’s social anxieties. Bear’s buddy Ian (Cooper Tomlinson) is more accomplished in the field of behaving like a person. Before Bear’s unexpectedly effective wish takes possession of Nikki, she is, too. But surely members of a generation weirded out by phone calls will feel a queasy sense of identification when Bear repeatedly stops short of initiating a genuine confrontation with his longtime friend. Even older millennials might recognize Bear’s timidity as the natural extension of a world where crush confessions might be more likely to materialize in online chats than in-person interactions.

Neither Obsession nor Backrooms has a whole lot of digital tech. The latter predates cell phones (or even the mainstreaming of personal computers), while the former sticks to standard bits of texting without feeling especially online. In both cases, the tech-light environment feels like a decision to keep the movie from feeling dated to this current moment, possibly even the result of self-consciousness about getting labeled as faddish, fast-fade projects rather than the product of more universal fears. It’s precisely that self-consciousness over being cringe that has gotten press in recent months as a defining characteristic of Gen Z.

Barker and Parsons are too obviously ambitious for that kind of hesitation, but their movies capture the uncertainty of a pandemic-paused life where all spaces and relationships become liminal without enough attention. Old slasher movies were sometimes described as punishing their teenage characters for bad decisions. Obsession and Backrooms both explore the personal hell of not making them at all.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. In addition to contributing at Decider, his work also appears regularly at The A.V. Club, The Guardian, and GQ, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.