The year is 2026, and it’s a good time to be a horror fan. From compelling expansions upon beloved franchises such as 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (released January 16), Ready or Not 2: Here I Come (March 20), and Evil Dead Burn (July 10), to inventive new takes on the genre such as Send Help (January 30), undertone (March 13), Hokum (May 1), and Leviticus (June 19), both new and established voices in the film industry have already delivered delicious frights, dark comedy, and searing social commentary that will undoubtedly keep thrill-seekers coming back to the theater for more. Momentum for the genre only promises to build as the year goes on, with late 2026 releases to include Zach Creggar’s upcoming adaptation of Resident Evil (September 18); the Jessica Chastain-led Other Mommy (October 9); James Gunn and Peter Safran’s DCU feature Clayface (October 23); and of course Robert Eggers’s much-anticipated Werwulf (December 25). By any metric, it’s a stacked lineup.

Still, two recent releases have arguably stolen the show.

Obsession, a supernatural wish-fulfillment nightmare starring Michael Johnston as young music store employee Bear and Inde Navarette as his unrequited crush Nikki, opened for US audiences on May 15 (Curry, 2026). Just two weeks later on May 29, it was joined in theaters by the liminal-space-infused psychological horror film Backrooms, led by Chiwetel Ejiofor as Clark, the listless owner of a stumbling furniture store, and Renate Reinsve as his well-meaning therapist Dr. Mary Kline (Parsons, 2026). Despite belonging to separate subgenres of horror and differing significantly in setting and plot, the two films have inspired comparison by critics and fans alike, and for good reason: Not only were they released within a matter of days of each other, but both films were directed by fledgling Gen Z filmmakers best known for their work on YouTube.

Curry Barker, the 26-year-old director, writer, and editor of Obsession, cut his cinematic teeth making short sketch comedy and horror videos online; he released his directorial debut feature film Milk & Serial for free on his YouTube channel in 2024, where it quickly became a viral sensation (Earl 2024). From there, Barker signed a representation deal with United Talent Agency and began his work on Obsession, which premiered at the 2025 Toronto Film Festival and was quickly acquired by Focus Features for worldwide distribution (Couch Mar. 2025; Earl 2025; Couch Sep. 2025). Backrooms director and co-scorer Kane Parsons’s career follows a similar trajectory; drawing on internet interest in liminal spaces and viral “backroom” images from 4chan, the now 20-year-old created the Backrooms web series and released it on YouTube (Goffe 2026; Parsons 2022-2025). The series, which now boasts hundreds of millions of collective views, was ultimately adapted into Parsons’ feature-length directorial debut of the same name, premiering at the Aero Theatre a little over three weeks before its theatrical release (Parsons 2022-2025; Shotwell 2026). Both films have been met with positive reviews—Obsession currently holds an impressive 94% on Rotten Tomatoes, with Backrooms not far behind at 87%—and are already massive box office successes. In just three weeks since its release, Obsession has grossed over $100 million worldwide on a meager $1 million budget, while Backrooms turned an impressive profit on its $10 million budget on opening weekend sales alone, which grossed $118 million worldwide (“Obsession” 2026; “Backrooms” 2026; D’Alessandro 2026). These films, like their young creators, are much-welcome success stories in an industry increasingly stilted by corporate consolidation and blatant cash grabs built on existing intellectual property, and the reception of Obsession and Backrooms speaks to film audiences’ appetite for new voices and original conceits within and beyond the horror genre.

However, it’s the central messaging of the films themselves that intrigues me the most, and what I expect has drawn in such large audiences and inspired such passionate discourse in such a short period of time. While most of the recent and upcoming releases in the genre reflect the perspectives of Boomer, Gen X, and (increasingly) Millennial filmmakers, Obsession and Backrooms represent the vanguard of a new generation of horror, offering our first glimpses at the collective fears that shape the psyche of those born in the late ’90s and early ’00s. To put it simply, Barker and Parsons are uniquely equipped as filmmakers to answer a simple question: What scares Gen Z?

Let’s take a look at Obsession. On the surface, the film plays out as a fairly straightforward be-careful-what-you-wish-for parable—in desperation to have his crush on Nikki requited, Bear snaps the mysterious “One Wish Willow” he purchased for her at a local gift shop and wishes for Nikki to love him more than anyone in the world. His wish is granted, with predictably disastrous results. While some may view Bear’s fatal mistake in the early minutes of the film to be his decision not to simply confess his feelings for Nikki and face the possibility of rejection, or his choice to use the “One Wish Willow” at all, the film makes it abundantly clear that what ultimately dooms Bear (and several other characters around him) is not his cowardice or the supernatural wish-granting device itself, but the inherent creepiness of Bear’s willingness to wish away Nikki’s free will in pursuit of attaining the idea of her. As the supernatural theft of Nikki’s autonomy takes effect, the shift in her behavior is apparent—she exhibits a sudden, uncharacteristic clinginess towards Bear only occasionally punctuated by confused repulsion at her own actions. Bear soon dismisses his half-hearted concern for Nikki’s well-being once it becomes apparent that he stands to benefit from her altered state of consciousness, and soon enough, the two characters are dating, much to the horror of their mutual friends.

As a deeply uncomfortable sex scene unfolds, in which Inde Navarette skillfully juxtaposes porn-like groans and moans with the dead eyes and expressionless face of a traumatized young woman dissociating, Barker destroys any benefit of the doubt we may still reserve for the film’s protagonist; Bear’s violation of Nikki’s bodily autonomy is tantamount to rape, and his dogged insistence in continuing their sham “relationship” despite her evident suffering effectively imprisons her in the obsession he imposed upon her.

While Bear undoubtedly experiences some terrifying moments over the course of the film, the true horror in Obsession lies in the consequences of his villainy for Nikki. Barker takes several opportunities to remind the audience that the real, autonomous Nikki we meet at the outset of the film is trapped inside her cursed counterpart—examples of her true self breaking through begin with innocuous hints like her writing “not me” on a Polaroid picture of herself and escalate to her screaming in agony down the “One Wish Willow” customer service phone line, engaging in acts of grievous self-harm, and finally begging Bear to kill her as her obsessive alter-ego sleeps. In one particularly horrifying scene, Nikki reads an excerpt of her creative writing at a party she and Bear attend; speaking from the perspective of the fairy tale character Gretel, she expresses a compulsive sexual desire for her brother Hansel “that only the branch of a willow tree could conjure.” This scene, combined with the testimony from Bear and Nikki’s mutual friends that she only ever viewed him as a little brother, hammers home the extent to which the real Nikki is disgusted and disturbed by the supernatural obsession that has taken root in her body. Her manufactured relationship with Bear feels incestuous—viscerally and morally wrong—and she explicitly expresses a preference for death over continuing to endure it. It is no wonder that for the first generation in over 50 years to come of age in the US without the federally protected right to abortion, the horror in the violation of Nikki’s bodily autonomy (by a controlling man wrongfully convinced of his own goodness, no less) hits home (Williams & Gregorian 2022).

It’s worth noting that Bear is offered a path to redemption with respect to Nikki on numerous occasions throughout Obsession, but doubles down on his diabolical decision-making every time. In an attempt to “fix” his now-girlfriend, Bear calls the “One Wish Willow” helpline; however, when asked if he wants to cancel his wish, he clarifies that he only wants to modify it. He then buys another “One Wish Willow” and tries to wish for Nikki to only love him platonically. His choices here are telling. Despite Nikki’s pain at his hands, Bear has no desire to fully liberate her free will and accept a potential scenario in which she rejects him as a romantic partner, or even as a friend, instead attempting to tweak the terms of his control over her until she behaves to his liking. Even in the final moments of the film, Bear can’t bring himself to commit the one truly selfless act that will certainly free Nikki from his wish; he picks up a gun to shoot himself but puts it down, then swallows an overdose of his late grandmother’s opioids only to immediately attempt to vomit them back up. Ironically, it’s not Bear but Nikki herself who precipitates his death and breaks the curse overriding her personhood—as Bear tries desperately to induce his gag reflex and prevent his own suicide, Nikki breaks her own “One Wish Willow” off-screen, presumably wishing that Bear would reciprocate the extent of her “love” for him. Only then does Bear accept the necessity of his death, making his one redemptive act of the entire film not a product of his character, but a side-effect of the hubris that drove him to cast his disturbing wish in the first place. There is nothing morally grey about Bear; he is a villain through and through, with his nice-guy persona nothing more than a flimsy façade masking a violent misogynist intent on dehumanizing the woman he claims to love.

Backrooms, despite its surface-level differences from Obsession, taps into similar themes with respect to gender. We meet Clark at a nadir in his personal and professional life—reeling from a recent divorce caused in part by his unaddressed drinking problem, Backrooms’s protagonist is now living full-time in his perpetually empty furniture store, his nights punctuated by wistful drive-bys of the home he once shared with his wife and long hours spent drinking in a showroom bed while watching television. While roleplaying a past marital argument with his therapist Mary, it doesn’t take long for Clark’s bitterness and indignance about his lot in life to take center-stage; rather than taking the divorce as an opportunity to re-evaluate his relationship with alcohol and build healthier connections with the people around him, he wallows in a self-reinforcing victim complex that only intensifies with his isolation. While we never meet Clark’s ex-wife, we learn that she is a graduate student pursuing law school while coping with an unnamed health condition that has forced her to take medical leave in the past—as a failed architect now resigned to selling furniture in a pirate costume, Clark takes his partner’s persistence in her career aspirations as a personal attack and cruelly insults her work ethic and appearance. In this sense, the protagonists of Obsession and Backrooms are two sides of the same patriarchal coin: like Bear, Clark is an entitled male character unwilling to recognize himself as the architect of his own unhappiness—the so-called victim of a male loneliness epidemic that he himself designed. And how does Clark respond to his self-imposed predicament? Like Bear, he makes it everyone else’s problem.

Clark stumbles upon an entrance to the backrooms by walking through a wall in the basement of his store, soon discovering that the seemingly endless maze of uncanny office-like space is home to something more nefarious than abandoned furniture and illogical architecture. Despite a clear understanding of the danger the mysterious alternate dimension poses to visitors, he recruits his two young employees to explore the backrooms alongside him, promising them overtime pay while withholding information about the nature of their mission. Their “research” ultimately culminates in both employees’ deaths, with one being dragged off-screen by an unseen entity and the other’s decapitated head appearing in a refrigerator later in the film.

To be clear, Mary’s questionable choice to follow Clark into an alternate dimension is entirely her own—while Clark’s disturbing voice message luring her into the backrooms rightfully concerns Mary as a mental health professional, it’s her savior complex that ultimately drives her decision to travel alone to Clark’s furniture store, and upon discovering the backrooms, to venture inside in an attempt to retrieve him. When Mary encounters Clark in the yellow-hued abyss, however, we discover the extent to which her client’s mental state poses a threat to her safety. Rather than leaving with Mary or at least helping his therapist escape, Clark chokes Mary until she falls unconscious and ties her to a dining room chair; she wakes to him hosting a grim parody of a family dinner alongside three humanoid figures of unclear sentience, during which he forces her to re-enact the role of his ex-wife and encourages her to eat the stuffing-like flesh of one of his largely inanimate companions. Over the course of their conversation, Clark admits to liking the atmosphere of the backrooms, viewing his new home as a place where he has no obligation to engage in self-help and is free to embrace his worst instincts without any accountability. Of all the scenes in the film, this one is the most revealing about Clark’s motivations as a character: He knows that he is engaging in destructive patterns of behavior that are harming him and those around him, and he knows that he should work to reroute those patterns. The problem is not that Clark doesn’t realize that he should do better; it’s that he simply doesn’t want to try.

Parsons underscores this point as Clark and Mary’s conversation is interrupted by the previously unseen entity stalking the halls of the backrooms; the creature is revealed to be a humanoid pirate bearing a strong resemblance to Clark himself. Clark, clearly having survived interactions with the pirate before, attempts to reason with the entity, reassuring him that neither he nor the creature have any obligation to change—in response, the pirate kills Clark and spends the remainder of its screentime chasing Mary through the backrooms as she fights for her life. The message of Clark’s fate here is as blatant as Backrooms’s storytelling gets: Clark’s decision to embrace his psychological demons and eschew personal growth literally costs him his life. Mary, realizing that she can’t “save” a client so bent on manifesting his own destruction, ultimately preserves the life of the only character she is truly capable of saving: herself.

The endings of Obsession and Backrooms bear an eerie similarity—the male protagonist, now responsible for the death of two other people, dies as a direct consequence of his own actions in front of the traumatized female lead. Both female leads survive until the credits roll, but neither gets anything remotely resembling a happy ending. Nikki, finally freed from Bear’s curse upon his death, finds herself surrounded by the corpses of her three closest friends—as the sole survivor of her former friend’s tyranny, she faces a lifetime of post-traumatic stress and the possibility of legal consequences for the crimes committed over the course of the film. Mary, while ultimately surviving her encounter with the backrooms, is left in a state of limbo as the Async Research Institute interrogates her about her experience. When she asks the researcher Phil what her future holds, he doesn’t answer the question. Backrooms ultimately leaves the audience with a disturbing closing sequence: We watch in horror as backroom-copies of each of the “real-world” locations from the film flash across the screen, culminating in the image of a warped still-life figure of Mary sitting motionless in the dining room chair where Clark confined her. The implication that some version or part of Mary remains trapped in the backrooms despite her physical escape mirrors the grim future Nikki faces in the aftermath of Obsession; the films may be over, but the horror lives on for the women bearing the brunt of the male protagonists’ actions.Here lies the central takeaway of both of the Gen Z horror breakout successes of 2026: Whether it’s a so-called nice guy harboring feelings of entitlement to the body and mind of his female friend, or a recent divorcé unwilling to recognize his responsibility for his personal and professional failings, there is no greater threat to the safety and security of the public—and to the bodily integrity of women and girls in particular—than a self-important man who refuses to accept the reality of his own life.

Gen Z is all too familiar with the tyranny of male violence, particularly in the US Following the expiration of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban in 2004, within weeks of Barker’s fifth birthday and well over a year before Parsons was born, mass shooting rates rose (Lundberg et al. 2024). Like millions of Gen Z Americans, Barker and Parsons grew up in the era of weekly school shootings; the overwhelming majority of mass shootings are committed by men and boys, a demographic increasingly influenced by the toxic masculine ideals espoused by the burgeoning “manosphere” (“Gunfire on School Grounds in the United States” 2026; “Mass Shooting Factsheet” 2026; “Misogyny, Extremism, and Gun Violence” 2022). The #MeToo movement, which reached its zenith the year Barker turned 18 and Parsons turned 11, also shaped the Gen Z psyche considerably, irrevocably exposing the ubiquity of sexual violence disproportionately victimizing women and girls at the hands of powerful men in all sectors of society (Khomami 2017). Now that we find ourselves in the second term of an accused sexual predator’s presidency without even the most basic legal protections on our reproductive rights, whether Barker or Parsons explicitly intended their work to hinge on such powerful gender commentary is almost beside the point—the resonance of their work in a post-Dobbs, MAGA-dominated sociopolitical landscape speaks for itself (Padilla 2026; Williams & Gregorian 2022). The critical acclaim and box office success of Obsession and Backrooms therefore should not be treated as isolated breakthroughs, but as bellwethers for a cinematic future in which Gen Z perspectives on horror are given the resources and freedom to take the big screen by storm. This generation’s art has something to say, and the least we can do is give them more microphones.

This is not to say that Barker and Parsons are or should be the definitive voices of their film generation. Both of the young filmmakers discussed here are white men from the US—if anything, their success should galvanize studios to invest in a wider range of up-and-coming Gen Z creatives, especially BIPOC creators, LGBTQ+ creators, female creators, creators based outside the US, and other artists currently underrepresented in the film industry. The massive returns that Obsession and Backrooms have garnered on stringent budgets have proven that it doesn’t take a nine-figure budget, decades-old franchises, or the attachment of household names to make a blockbuster; audiences are actively seeking out original concepts, creative production choices, and new talent on and off the screen. Compelling horror stories are best told by those with both the positionality to handle them with care and the courage to take a big swing in the name of art; who better than the young to take on such a challenge? If the film industry learns the right lessons from the success of Obsession and Backrooms, the future of Gen Z horror promises to be sharply critical of the status quo and replete with inventive film-making techniques—above all, it promises to be spectacularly bone-chilling for cinephiles and casual movie-goers alike. I, for one, couldn’t be more excited.

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