When was the last time you went to the cinema for a film you were genuinely excited about?

For many viewers, that question reveals a bigger truth than the familiar claim that cinemas are dying: audiences have not abandoned the movie theatre, but they have grown tired of being offered the same remakes, sequels, and formulaic stories that no longer feel worth the price of admission. In recent years, many of the films that have broken into the box office top 10 have been part of established franchises, such as The Devil Wears Prada 2, Toy Story 5, and Wuthering Heights.

Paul Dergarabedian, head of marketplace trends at Comscore, argues that “studios clearly feel that audience comfortability — with going to see a movie where they already, in some sense, know what they’re getting before they walk into the auditorium — is a bet worth making” (Whitten, CNBC). Familiarity, especially when paired with nostalgia, can make audiences more willing to buy a ticket. But what happens when remakes or sequels fail to live up to expectations?

One problem with remakes is that they often leave little lasting impression. Instead of challenging familiar clichés, they tend to rely on comfort, repetition, and predictability. Over time, that formula becomes exhausting, especially when so many new releases are either remakes, sequels, or part of an existing franchise.

Of course, nostalgia and familiarity has its place. I am not entirely against remakes or franchises, because sometimes you just want to revisit a film you saw years ago simply for the comfort and memories it brings back. But what makes a film truly special, in my opinion, is its ability to spark conversation, evoke real emotion, and stay with me long after the credits roll. And recently movies written and directed by new and upcoming young voices are breaking box office records especially with the recent releases of the Backrooms and Obsession.

There has been a surge of indie horror films created by content creators who first gained attention on YouTube. A standout example is Talk to Me, released in 2022, directed by Michael and Danny Philippou – Australian twin brothers who started off as Youtubers posting chaotic home movies and stunt videos. Their breakout hit Talk to Me became a major box office success, grossing $92.2 million globally, and was acquired by A24. The film stood out because it offered a fresh spin on the possession trope, following a group of friends who experiment with an embalmed hand as a party game.

Taken from Reddit, original post from 4Chan

What distinguishes filmmakers like Kane Parsons, 20, and Curry Barker, 26, is not that they reject existing horror tropes, but that they rework them through the visual and emotional logic of the internet. Both films are directed by creators in their twenties, which introduces a degree of cultural and emotional proximity between filmmaker and audience. Their trajectories from small-scale content creators to theatrical directors, reinforces a sense of accessibility. Unlike established auteurs associated with high-budget productions, Parsons and Barker developed their craft independently, working with limited resources and self-taught skills. Yet it is precisely this background that enables them to produce stories that feel immediate, relevant, and grounded in contemporary experience, often sparking conversations that extend beyond the screen into everyday life.

The lives of young people no longer revolve around Hollywood, and the younger generation’s media consumption habits are drastically different from what they once were. Passive content consumption on platforms such as YouTube and TikTok now even surpasses streaming services such as Disney+ and Netflix, according to financial research firm MoffettNathanson. The firm found that YouTube earned an estimated $62 billion in revenue in 2025, surpassing The Walt Disney Co.’s media business, which generated $60.9 billion last year, excluding Disney’s lucrative experiences division (Weprin).

Courtesy of Isaiah Nichols

These creators did not achieve success overnight; instead, they spent several years building an audience. When they debuted on the big screen, their existing audience naturally flocked to theatres to watch their works. These audiences had spent years consuming their content, engaging in discussions, and interacting with the creators' work. Coming from a background of homemade videos and low budgets makes these creators more relatable to the coming-of-age YouTube generation than to television personalities or Hollywood stars, particularly because the younger generation spends more time consuming media on social platforms than watching shows and films on streaming sites.

According to the Pew Research Center,

(Lama et al.).

In addition,

spend more than five hours on their mobile phones each day (Coulbourne et al.).

So, the threat of declining theatre audiences is not coming from streaming platforms either, as the younger generation has chosen to prioritise social media as its main form of entertainment. With a plethora of free, high-quality content created by self-funded independent creators, offering fresher and more interesting plots and forms of storytelling, alongside content optimised for engagement and advertising, rising subscription fees, and increasing cost-of-living pressures and job instability, who would still be eager to keep paying for streaming services when free, compelling entertainment is so readily available?

This shift goes deeper than economics or platform preferences alone. It reflects a fundamental change in how audiences relate to media: they are no longer passive consumers waiting for content to be handed to them, but active participants who help shape, circulate, and sustain it. This is the essence of participatory culture, in which meaning is co-created between creators and audiences rather than imposed from above. As media scholar Henry Jenkins writes in Participatory Culture in a Networked Era, "Participation doesn't just mean being active; it is also about being part of a shared practice and culture" (Jenkins et al. 21). From TikTok stitches and fan theories to online discussions, comment sections, reposts, memes, and recreations of scenes from films, these are all forms of participation that emerge when a film captures public attention. This is not a new phenomenon. Online communities have been around since the 90s with the development of the internet and social media allows us to easily connect with like-minded people from different backgrounds to connect, share ideas, and engage in global conversations. As a study on online communities notes, “We are past the pastoralist myth that community is always a good thing, and we are also past the dystopian screed that digital media has killed community. … We have colonized social media and made community work – both online and offline.” (Gruzd et al. 1191) This explains how online attention can build into something larger: a shared cultural investment that follows a film from the internet to the cinema.

The Backrooms, Found Footage, 2022, (5:37)

It is precisely this dynamic that explains why filmmakers like Kane Parsons and Curry Barker have been able to draw audiences back into theatres. Their online work had already cultivated dedicated communities and generated sustained excitement long before their feature films were released. As a result, their theatrical debuts became more than just movies; they became shared cultural events. Audiences were not simply showing up to watch a film, they were participating in a moment they had already helped build online. In doing so, these films bridged the fragmented, participatory nature of internet culture with the collective experience of the cinema.

Kane Parsons’s Backrooms and Curry Barker’s Obsession function as cinematic dramatisations of the anxieties inherent in our modern era. Backrooms explores the terror of spatial instability, rendering existential dread tangible through endless, repetitive corridors that deny any stable point of orientation. Obsession, by contrast, applies this same principle of instability to human relationships, following a man named Bear who uses supernatural means to force a connection with a woman named Nikki. The film exposes the destructive consequences of entitlement and coercive control, stripping away autonomy in a world where emotional dependency has become a source of profound anxiety.

Courtesy of Focus Features

These narratives find their philosophical grounding in Zygmunt Bauman’s theory of "liquid modernity." Zygmunt Bauman (1925-2017) was a prominent Polish-British sociologist and philosopher best known for this theory. Bauman argues that contemporary society is characterised by fluidity and instability, where structures that once provided certainty such as work, identity, and relationships, have become increasingly temporary. Which could be applied to so many aspects of our lives right now with the economical and political instabilities that us Gen Z’s are going through as we are adulting and figuring our way through society. In this "liquid" stage of modernity, "patterns and configurations are no longer 'given', let alone 'self-evident;'"they are now malleable and do not keep their shape for long (Bauman 7).  

Liminal spaces exist now only as memory, remembered in their most essential parts, an abstraction of what they once were. This mirrors Gen Z's relationship with much of the world: malls that were once bustling with life are now just endless empty corridors, the once vibrant and playful McDonald’s now grey and modern. We react to constantly changing environments around us while yearning for something familiar. This spatial horror of the Backrooms mirrors Bauman's descriptions of architectural and social "non-places." Defined as "space[s] devoid of the symbolic expressions of identity, relations and history" (Bauman 138). The endless maze of the backrooms, is all a giant metaphor for how confusing and unpredictable life is hence it relates back to the “modern labyrinth”. The rules of life we once relied on—like having a stable job until retirement, building a family, and following a clear-cut career path, have disappeared.

Courtesy of A24

A Deloitte survey found that "more than half of Gen Zs (55%) and millennials (52%) say they are delaying major life decisions." With the uncertainties shaping our world, the path is no longer linear, and there remains a persistent fear of not reaching our goals. Instead of following a map, we are wandering through a space that is messy, confusing, and constantly adding new twisting passages and dead ends. Backrooms resonate with many, whether consciously or not, because it feels like we're stuck in a loop.

Simultaneously, Barker's Obsession illustrates Bauman's philosophy of obsession within the context of fragile modern human bonds. "Bonds and partnerships tend to be viewed and treated as things meant to be consumed, not produced; they are subject to the same criteria of evaluation as all other objects of consumption" (Bauman 163). Bauman observes that commitments are no longer bound by wedding vows but have become mechanisms to instantly gratify our needs. Mutual effort is no longer required to build a relationship—just as Bear uses the One Wish Willow to wish that Nikki would like him back. "The lot of a free agent is full of antinomies not easy to take stock of, let alone to disentangle" (Bauman 49). Nikki should have the autonomy to decide whether to enter a relationship with Bear, but because he cannot handle potential rejection, he makes a wish to gratify his needs instantly, stripping away her right to choose.

Courtesy of Focus Features

Obsession reflects the horrors of dating for our generation, particularly the fragility of masculinity and the pressure placed on men to always appear desirable, assertive, and in control. Bear’s inability to accept rejection turns intimacy into entitlement, showing how vulnerable some men can be when affection is denied. The film also speaks to a wider sense of emotional scarcity among Gen Z, where the desire for connection is intense but the ability to sustain it often feels out of reach as shown in GWI’s November 2024 research found that “eight in 10 Gen Z respondents (80%) agree they’ve felt lonely in the past 12 months” (Kamal).

We react to constantly changing environments around us while yearning for something familiar.

In the end, Backrooms and Obsession reveal that the problem was never the cinema itself, but the sameness of the films being offered. When stories speak to contemporary fears, reflect the emotional reality of a generation, and emerge from creators audiences already know and trust, theatres can still feel urgent, communal, and necessary. These films do not merely draw viewers back to the big screen, they remind us that audiences are still willing to show up when cinema gives them something worth believing in.

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