“How do we get kids off their phones?” the seasoned cry as they lay their heads down on their pillows every night. “If we could find ways to appeal to audiences who have been developing buying power for more than a decade, surely the industry could steady the ship and return to the glory and dominance of decades past.”
2026 will be looked back on in genre spaces for the back-to-back phenomena of Backrooms and Obsession. The longstanding impact is yet to be seen, but it is already apparent that Hollywood execs are over-simplifying the lessons they could learn from these stories.
“YouTubers! We need prodigy YouTubers!”
I don’t work in marketing. I’m a bartender at a movie theater with a bit more than a cynical slant on the movie industry. But even if it's not my professional opinion, it's easy to see why these movies succeeded. Obviously, they are gripping and funny, and everyone loves an underdog story, but they are part of a much wider trend in what appeals to anyone younger than Millennials.
It is not simply that these YouTube wunderkinds hold some kind of magic key in and of themselves. YouTube is a youth-driven platform because it's accessible. Since its creation, the bulk of its creators have been young, and the viewers even younger. Enough time has passed that kids do not remember a world before the commodification of YouTube, much less its existence as a hub for everything we as humans are capable of — both good and bad.
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Kids raised by Let’s Plays, horror lore theorists, and creepypastas are now old enough to be making videos and movies themselves. Five Nights at Freddy’s, Poppy’s Playtime, Bendy and the Inkwell, Art The Clown, Buddy the Unicorn, One Wish Willow, the 2017 version of Pennywise, the generation-crossing fandom of Chucky specifically in slasher canon, Skinamarink, the collective works of Jane Schoebrun, “Spider-Man x Elsa pregnancy dental surgery,” et al. The list is extensive, crosses mediums, and often involves either drinking straight from the source of the digital river or wading through the unfiltered internet cultural runoff downstream. This has been a consistent trend in modern horror for fans under 30.
This is only a sample, and are by no means the only stories getting popular, but why are these specific characters and storytelling elements resonating so strongly? What do they say about where this generation is at and where the next might be headed? After all, these are horror fans who were forged by putting in hard hours in the fandom mines of the internet.
YouTube is our oldest surviving social platform on the internet and the reason for its longevity parallels much of what we see in our this newer generation of fictional characters and exploratory themes. It, too, is something that was once pure or innocent and has since been distorted into something approachable but capable of great evil.
Like a dying mall, what once was a temple of consumption and a third space for teens to hang out is now vacuous and nefarious. YouTube wasn’t built for this; in many of the ways that these new monsters weren't designed (in their fictional universes) to be wrong or to elicit fear. They were just games; things to simply play with and have a bit of fun. Once upon a time, these creations concealed their sinister truths by seeming inviting and family-friendly. Something that looked good in a thumbnail but hid a dark secret kids were drawn to. Now it is no longer a subversion; it simply is horror.
Are now-adults collectively drawn to something designed to be gruesome as a sense of comfort because these were the icons of said childhood? It certainly seems so. At the very least, new creators are taking control over how the internet ghost stories and adolescent fears of their generation scarred them because they are fostered by the social aspects that made them grow in the first place.
Much has been said about the “torture porn” genre of films that emerged in the wake of 9/11 and the bullshit war in Iraq now that we’ve had enough years in the rearview to look at it as a whole. That shaped the adolescence of many in my generation, and the gore on screen we were naturally drawn to was an attempt to self-soothe and work through the way our future was crumbling before our eyes. When entire classrooms watched businessmen jump to their deaths and were only ever one click away from beheading videos, the movies needed to keep up in order to maintain their effectiveness.
Now what of the cognizance of both Gen Z and Gen Alpha? They didn’t have their own 9/11. Instead, they have 100% pure, uncut cyber fascism, daily genocide footage, and a lifetime spent worrying about school shootings. I think enough time has passed over the last decade or so to look back on what struck a chord with those who have only ever known a world after everything changed forever.
Cartoons, clowns, toys, and all manner of childhood friendliness have become distorted and hostile. Everything adults made to give kids insight, comfort, and joy has rotted away, leaving only a need to consume it for malicious, selfish ends. People have abandoned places of youthful joy or escapism. Those who once had good intentions for what they wanted to pass on to children have been cast aside in favor of corporate efficiency. When Ms. Rachel needs to take it into her own hands to protect the children of Gaza, it is very clear that the guardrails were ripped out and sold for scrap a long time ago.
We live in a world where young people (even the ones who are full adults) are treated like idiots by four-quadrant glop that is, ironically, far more liminal than the movies that are designed to be uncomfortably empty. These are the hollowed out spaces between theaters 2 and 7 – the screens for the studio releases – that you may not even consider. It all exists simply because it must and it's usually IP-driven obligations that data says millennials and Gen X will love.
All this is to say, it is no wonder Obsession and Backrooms have succeeded. They feel different not only because of who is making them, but because they speak a different language altogether. They scratch the parts of the brain that encourage discussion, theories, and openendedness, and affirm the behaviors of those who spent their childhood dumping lore about William Afton with strangers and grandparents.
I don’t have all of the algorithmic data that drives movie-making decisions, but I can see exactly who comes in to see what movies, and I know damn well how old they are when I need to ID their cherubic faces. But making something isn’t the same as making something that resonates. What we are drawn to as individuals and as a collective says so much about who we are and what we have been through. Data is bullshit. Learning what speaks to people comes with understanding each other. That’s what art is for, and the raw emotion of horror remains the best outlet for it.
