The Journal. - ‘Backrooms’ Turns an Online Obsession Into Box-Office Gold

Episode Date: June 12, 2026

Two scrappy horror films are taking Hollywood by surprise. “Backrooms” and “Obsession” have wildly exceeded expectations at the box office. Both spring from internet culture and have brought an unprecedented numbers of Gen Z-ers into theaters. WSJ's Ben Fritz explains what this new wave means for the movie business. Jessica Mendoza hosts. Further Listening: - Why Hollywood Can't Find Good Scripts - Hollywood Jobs Are Disappearing Sign up for WSJ’s free What’s News newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All Spring, our colleague Ben Fritz's 14-year-old son has been bugging him to see one particular movie. My son knows that I sometimes can snag tickets to premieres or early screenings. Ben covers the entertainment industry, and the movie in question was a horror film called Backrooms. That's how I first learned this film existed, which he started asking me if I could get him into the earliest possible screening, ideally into the premiere.

Backrooms started as an idea on the internet. And along with millions of other teenagers, Ben's son had closely tracked Backrooms' Evolution online. This wasn't just like, oh, this is a cool movie. This is like, you know, a big screen expansion of this whole mythology that has been really meaningful to him for several years. Ben actually did get tickets to the premiere, and he was amazed by how much his son had to say about the film. He was like, oh, well, you have to understand that in this scene, like, what this image represents is X. And it's kind of similar to his videos, but it's different in this way. So was he talking to you the entire time this thing was happening?

He's, you know, we've raised him in Los Angeles. He knows you have to keep your mouth shut in a movie theater. Okay, good. But afterward, he could not keep his mouth shut. It couldn't stop talking to me. Ben was struck by all this excitement. His son's a member of Gen Z, a demographic. that Hollywood has been struggling to crack for years.

Genzi just doesn't go to the movies the way previous generations have. That might be changing, though. Backrooms wasn't expected to be a major hit. But in just a few weeks, gensiers have turned out in droves to make it one of the most profitable movies of the year. And how significant is that for Hollywood in this moment?

It's really significant. A lot of people believe that the only movies that get people into theaters these days are franchises. People just want to see the 10th iteration of their favorite superhero or robot or toy adaptation or remake or whatever. So to see something that's highly original and gets young people into theaters is a huge deal for the movie business. Are we watching kind of the dawn of the Gen Z movie era? Yes, we definitely are watching the dawn of the Gen Z movie era. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power.

I'm Jessica Mendoza. It's Friday, June 12th. Coming up on the show, Gen Z goes to the movies, finally. Backrooms is a psychological horror film. It's about a furniture store owner who discovers a mysterious portal in his shop's basement that leads to another world. I found something in the store. Okay. That world is a series of abandoned rooms and hallways that are hung with yellow wallpaper and flooded with fluorescent light.

It looks a lot like reality, but it's off-kilter, uncanny. All these places and buildings, rooms, misremembering themselves. I saw the movie myself last week, and it doesn't have as much gore or as many jump scares as a lot of horror films do, but there was a pervasive sense of creepiness and being trapped. How did backrooms come about? Backrooms started with a single photograph of a fluorescent lit room that was posted on the message board for Chan back in 2019, and people started latching onto it.

That single photo inspired all kinds of content. People posted similar images and had discussions on Reddit, uploaded videos on YouTube and TikTok, and even made Roblox games. I think I found the backrooms. There exists a world that you can only reach between 3.30 and 33.m. No, this can't be real. This can't be real, bro.

And it became a mean, and everybody was, they were sort of using it to express this feeling, I think, of on we and feeling lost in the world and feeling kind of very exposed but not understanding what was happening. and that really, I think, became relevant for Gen Z during the pandemic when everybody was stuck at home. So I think the whole backwards mythology is built around this feeling that is very relatable to fans of being like, I'm not there, I'm not here, I'm somewhere in between, I don't know how to get out of it.

The filmmaker, Kane Parsons, is a Gen Zier himself. When he started posting videos about backrooms on YouTube in 2022, he was just 16. Sound? Camera. Rolling. All right. And, and...

Action. And they were different genres that were all scary. I would definitely call them broadly creepy. What the fuck? This isn't real. This isn't real. There's this term on the internet you may have heard called creepypasta. Yeah.

And his videos very much fall into that. And the style of these videos was very much like found footage, right? Yes, absolutely. It feels like it's, you know, intentionally amateurish in that sense. right? Like it doesn't, it's not me to feel smooth and slick. Yeah. Which gives it that creepy vibe. So yeah, you could think of it like the Blair Witch Project. Sure.

If you remember that movie from 25 years ago, except instead of in the dark in a forest, it's inside in a brightly lit room. Parsons' early videos got tens of millions of views, so many that he started attracting attention from Hollywood. According to Ben's reporting, Parsons talked to several studios, often turning to the advice of his high school film teacher. Eventually, Parsons signed a deal with the independent film company A24, best known for everything everywhere all at once, Marty Supreme, and Moonlight.

And what did A24 see in his work? Besides the millions of views, right? He is a filmmaker who is meaningful to a certain group of people, and they're going to be excited to come out. And A24's, I think, intention was, hey, just, like a small number of young fans who love Backrooms and the Internet come, we'll have a success. This movie costs $10 million that makes $50 million will be amazed, you know?

Turns out, Backrooms did even better than that. In its opening weekend alone, it made more than $80 million domestically. Since its release two weeks ago, A24 said that the movie has made about $230 million globally, making it the company's highest grossing film to date. Now, if we were talking only about Backrooms, right, we would be like, okay, this was a one-off horror film that really shot into success. But there's another film, another horror film that's going gangbusters at the box office right now, Obsession. Can you tell us about that? Yeah, so Obsession is made by a director named Curry Barker who came to fame on the internet.

Like the director of Backrooms, Barker is also Gen Z. He's 26. he initially got some attention for his funny and scary videos online. And then he had an idea to make a feature-length horror movie. And he got financing, he made it for $750,000. Wow. That's it, right? Incredibly cheap. And they took it to the Toronto Film Festival where it played like gangbusters. You know, it was just a phenomenon.

Obsession is about a 20-something who makes a wish to win over his crush. And magically, he gets exactly what he wants. but it goes horribly wrong. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. That movie came out,

and it has been the most amazing box office phenomenon. Honestly, I can say, in certainly my professional career, which is that it opened to $17 million, which is very good for a low-budget horror movie, but nothing spectacular. And then every weekend since then, the grosses have gotten better and better.

Typically, a movie would fall like 50% on the second weekend. And it would continue happening every weekend. Usually, like, the opening weekend is its best weekend, is what you're saying? Exactly. Okay. That's almost always what happens to a movie. To see a movie go up get more and more popular as it goes on, the only way I can think of to describe it is the movie has gone viral,

like an internet video. To date, obsession has grossed nearly $250 million at the box office. Part of why these movies are doing so well is that they're horror. They join a long tradition of cheaply made horror movies doing better than expected, like Scream and The Blair Witch Project and paranormal activity. Horror is a genre that is very effective at low budgets. And I think there's a lot of reasons. I mean, first of all, horror has always worked well in theaters because people like to be scared together.

Like it works when you're with a large group in the dark, maybe next to your boyfriend or girlfriend. It was fun to like be in a theater. and feel people sort of like go eat, like, beside you and like the corner of your eye. Right. That's really great. You just can't replicate that at home, you know? So that's a big thing. So I don't want to see this as unique to Jimsy.

Like young people have always driven the horror genre, you know, all the way back to, like, Texas chainsaw massacre. So that's always been true because, you know, it's all about the things that are dangerous and that are unknown out there in the world. And you're at an age when you were going out into a scary, world, I think. So if the formula of the cheaply made horror film has worked for previous generations, what is it about these two movies that work for Gen Z, you know, that actually got them into theaters? Well, I think very much that they feel like they are authentic films for and by Gen Z,

you know, and so these are the first big successful movies that are made by Gen Z talent who came out of Internet culture. and speaks very much to that culture. You know, I don't think a millennial could have made these movies. After the break, how these surprise hits are helping drive Hollywood's best summer in years. For a couple of years now, the tried and true movie formula that Hollywood has relied on has been losing steam. Big franchises that have dominated the box office for a long time, like Marvel, like Fast and Furious, are having a harder time. They're not as successful consistently as they used to be.

This past spring, the industry put out a couple of movies that did well with audiences, though they weren't a huge departure from the traditional blockbuster formula. The things people talk about this year that's working really well are like feel-good, inspiring movies. The best example of that would be Project Hail Mary, which was a massive success. Please state your name. Ronald and Grace, they spoke up from a coma. I have several light years from my apartment. and I'm not an astronaut.

And, you know, that's a movie that you come out of feeling really good about humanity's ability to come together and solve difficult problems. That's something people are really looking for in the movies. And then also the nostalgia, particularly millennial nostalgia, has been really powerful at the box office. And the biggest examples of that recently are... Devil Wars Prada 2, which I also saw in the theater. Of course, I'm a millennial.

Yes, you were the crime demographic for that. Wait, wait. That's not what you're wearing to the dinner. That's all. And now summer movie season has started, which is an important time for the movie business. Yeah. What have Hollywood executives been planning? People are hopeful about the summer, and this is coming off of, you know, so far,

2026 has been the best year at the box office since the pandemic. And people are hopeful that I think three movies in particular look like it could be huge, which are Toy Story 5, Spider-Man brand new day, and the other. Odyssey from Chris Noah. But the surprise success of backrooms and obsession has been kind of a game changer in terms of what the industry thought could work. There's been this huge mindset change, and honestly just the past month in Hollywood. For so long, people were very depressed about, like, oh, well, Gen Z just spends all their

time staring at their phone and scrolling on TikTok and they don't want to go to movie theaters. Right. And now it's like, no, this doesn't have to be competition. This can be a place where we find talent, and that'll actually get Gen Z off their phones and bring them into theaters. So were these two movies kind of the proof that the industry was waiting for in some ways? Absolutely.

I mean, nobody in Hollywood saw the success of these movies coming. And their outsized, massive success, you know, is being widely attributed to the fact that they are sort of this new wave of YouTube or film, social media-born films, you know? It's the first movies that come out of Reddit and TikTok and Roblox and so on. And I don't think anybody in Hollywood really understood the potency of that until it's finally been proven. So what does this all tell you about where cinema is going? I think the age of the corporately managed franchise that gets where you pump out new installments as fast as possible and people keep coming is fading.

And I think people are looking for a new kind of authenticity. And, you know, if you love movies, this is good news, you know. This is like a win for, in at some extent, this is a win for originality. And this is a win for movies being like a place that people can really enjoy themselves and feel good. Is that enough, though, to get butts back in movie theater seats long term? It depends how you measure it. I mean, we're going to have probably certainly the best box office. year since the pandemic, but we're still not at the levels that we were pre-pandemic.

In the best case scenario for the domestic box office this year is it gets close to $10 billion. In 2019, it was a little over $11 billion. Like, it's still really hard to get people into theaters when there's so many other entertainment options. You know, that is just a fact of life, right? So it's still an uphill climb, but at least it's moving in the right direction for the first time this decade, really. Does it feel like it's too soon to say, like, blockbusters are done?

We're moving to an age of movies made off of the internet. Yeah, I mean, it's always a bad idea to say, a certain thing is over, and a certain thing is everything in Hollywood, right? But it is definitely true that low-budget horror, born out of digital culture, is something that we're going to see more and more of, and that clearly can be massively successful. And that's really meaningful to the industry.

In a moment when the entertainment industry in Hollywood is struggling, in a moment when we hear so much about theater's closing and not enough sales, ticket sales happening, like how important is this, even if it is just like kind of the beginnings of hope? Oh, it's hugely important. I mean, I would describe the mood in Hollywood for the past few years as really depressed. You know, people just felt like they were sort of like the last survivors, you know, in a dying industry. some ways. And this has spawned a lot of optimism, that Hollywood can make things that are commercially successful and culturally impactful. So people now feel like there's a promising path forward for the movie business for the first time in a long time. This episode has been updated. An earlier version said that the main character and obsession is in high school. He's

actually in his 20s. Before we go, we've got a two-part special about the billion-dollar business of the World Cup and the scandals that have dogged its rise. Part one is already in your feed. Part two comes out on Sunday. Be sure to check it out. That's all for today, Friday, June 12th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and the Wall Street Journal. Additional reporting in this episode by John Jurgensen and Esther Zuckerman. The shows made by Catherine Brewer, Evelyn Fahardo Alvarez, Pia Gidcarri, Max Green, Sophie Codner, Ryan Knietsin, Matt Kwong, Colin McNulty, Laura Morris, Enrique Perez de LaRosa, Sarah Platt, Alan Rodriguez-Espinoza, Heather Rogers, Pierce, Singey, Jivica Verma, Catherine Whalen, Tatiana Zamise, and me, Jessica Mendoza. Our engineers are Griffin Tanner, Nathan Singapok, and Peter Leonard. Our theme music is by So Wiley. Additional music this week from Peter Leonard, Billy Libby, Bobby Lord, Emma Munger, Haley Shaw, Nathan Singapok, Griffin Tanner, Extreme Music, and Blue Dot Sessions.

Backchecking this week by Mary Mathis. Thanks for listening. Happy Friday.