Backroom Obsessions

A week or so ago, our teenager went to see Backrooms with her friends. She bought her own tickets, drove herself to the theater, and sat in the dark with her pals in a packed house full of other kids. That struck me, because her generation consumes most of its media on phones, tablets, and laptops; sometimes via streaming services on the home TV. For many teens and young adults, going to the movies is something they remember doing with their parents when they were little; almost a retro activity.

The films drawing them into theaters are being made by slightly older generational peers—directors in their early-to-mid twenties who built their reputations on the same platforms their audiences live on. Two of this summer’s smash hits exemplify that: the aforementioned Backrooms, directed by Kane Parsons, and Obsession, directed by Curry Barker.

Barker and Parsons both came from online channels and built real audiences through craft, instinct, and quality work. Each of them has the kind of talent that could make them established filmmakers in roughly the same way Spielberg, Lucas, Cameron, Scorsese, and Coppola before them slipped through the cracks in the old studio system—outsiders who understood the evolving language of cinema better than the gatekeepers.

Curry Barker was born in 1999 in Mobile, Alabama—a self-described C-and-D student who played in the marching band and had his own rock group on the side. At the tender age of eleven, he watched The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and decided he wanted to explore those feelings from the other side of the lens. At eighteen he moved to Los Angeles, enrolled at the New York Film Academy, and dropped out—an age-old story—after meeting his collaborator Cooper Tomlinson. The two built a YouTube sketch comedy channel called That’s a Bad Idea, which ranges from absurdist comedy to provocative and often inventive horror. I’ve watched a bunch of it.

Obsession is his debut feature, made for $750,000. It sold to Focus Features for $15 million before it played a single American theater, opened wide in May 2026, and has since grossed north of $200 million worldwide. They actually canceled the planned digital release because it was making too much money to pull. The cherry for Barker: A24—which holds the rights to the Chainsaw franchise—has tapped him to reboot the series.

Kane Parsons is a little younger, born in 2005 in Petaluma, California to a video game developer dad and therapist mom. He taught himself 3D software during the pandemic, and in January 2022 he posted a nine-minute found-footage short called “The Backrooms,” in which a young filmmaker falls into an endless dimension of abandoned office space. It has nearly 80 million views to date. Studios started calling while Parsons was still in high school; A24 made an offer and he put off college. The feature Backrooms cost $10 million and took in $81.5 million domestically its opening weekend, making Parsons the youngest director ever to top the global box office. Maybe he won’t go back to school.

I’ve seen both films. I appreciated Backrooms aesthetically; its surreal, liminal qualities work on some mysterious, mushy part of your brain, though it’s basically a blown-up YouTube stunt. The plot constructed around the aesthetic is a little flimsy, but I want to spend time with Parsons’s channel before I say more.

Obsession I really loved. It’s fresh and disturbing, the performances are stellar, and Barker ultimately delivers not just horror but a thicket of allegories and metaphors about human interpersonal dynamics, particularly among young people. It’s a bit on the nose in a couple of spots, but for the most part it’s tight, smart, and deeply unsettling. Barker shares with the best comedy-horror filmmakers an ability to use laughter and dread interchangeably to unmoor the audience.

Not sure I’m the first to point out that this new pipeline is pretty male. So is the traditional one. So far the funnel selects for the same profile it always has. Let’s see some of that ballyhooed Zoomer egalitarianism. (Who even says “ballyhooed,” Dad?).

It’s not like the old guard is gone, at least not yet. Spielberg’s Disclosure Day is out this very Friday. Scorsese has another something coming on Netflix. The others are either entwined with the remaining institutions or have their own deals with streamers. Barker and Parsons built their audiences first, then found funnels into the larger system. It will work as long as kids keep showing up.