It’s looking like horror’s word of the year is well on its way to being ‘unprecedented.’ We have Curry Barker’s Obsession and Kane Parsons’ Backrooms to thank for this, two indie genre films that dominated the box office and broke records while going head-to-head with a new Star Wars film, The Mandalorian and Grogu.
Backrooms and Obsession won the latest box office weekend, claiming the first and second spots respectively. Backrooms shattered expectations with an $81 million haul domestically, $118 million worldwide. It’s the biggest opening weekend for an original horror movie and the biggest opening for A24, the movie’s distributor. Obsession, now in its third weekend, reached $26.4 million. It now sits at $148 million in worldwide earnings, which means it got people to go out to the movies on weekdays.
Obsession was made on a $1 million budget, Backrooms on $10 million. The directors behind them started out as YouTube creators. They’re both in their twenties. Parsons is now the youngest filmmaker to have a number one feature film at the box office at 20 years of age.
This combination has taken Hollywood by storm. Two indie horror movies went against Disney and beat it at its own game. They showed that high budget numbers and legacy franchises don’t guarantee success anymore. Audiences are looking for new experiences and perspectives that justify a trip to the movie theater.
Horror has been flying this flag for decades, with amazing examples of it found in films like The Exorcist, Jaws, A Quiet Place, Sinners, and It. People will go to theaters to get scared. They’ve shown to be more than willing to pay the price of admission to see terrible things unfold in the cold darkness of a massive screening room, along with other people there for the same reason.
The two movies in question here deliver that in spades. For some time now, horror has been immersed in stories that center on trauma. A24 led the way here with films such as Hereditary, Men, and Talk to Me. While fascinating at first, they quickly became near parodies of themselves. They were criticized for being too reliant on metaphors, with stories taking a backseat to the message.
Parsons and Barker find their horrors in the world of Creepypastas, a disturbing variant of the genre that finds in message board myths and analog aesthetics the means to deeply unsettle. This isn’t the realm of zombies and werewolves. It’s the home of cursed objects and obscure urban legends that latch on to people and don’t let go.
In Backrooms, hidden passageways in a furniture store lead to a liminal space made up of bland corridors and everyday objects. Something lurks there, something that’s not easy to categorize as a ghost or demon. In Obsession, a man makes a wish for his crush to be madly in love him. He gets his wish, and all the horror that comes with it. Turns out forced love comes with a few twitchy side effects.
There’s little, if anything, out there like this in the wild. There are elements of “The Monkey’s Paw” in Obsession, and fans of Backrooms can easily follow it up with Exit 8 (about a man stuck in a subway station loop of corridors). But none come off as copies or too-close-for-comfort homages of anything before it. Parsons and Barker set forth unique visions of horror with their films. They’re likely to become the directors other filmmakers will look to while making their own films.
Historically, horror has been reliable at the box office, and it’s been a shining light during lackluster box office runs before. But now? It can produce blockbusters (something it’s proven to be capable of at times as well, with The Conjuring series coming to mind). Obsession and Backrooms are rewriting the rules of what box office success can look like. Thus far, originality seems to be the new marker of it. The support audiences have afforded these movies point to a hunger for more risk-taking and more variety in future genre offerings. Studios should pay attention. It’s not often we get to see liminal spaces and dark wishes bring down Pedro Pascal and Baby Yoda.
