In a nine-day-old New Yorker piece titled “Backrooms, Obsession, and Hollywood’s Zoomer-Horror Renaissance”, Justin Chang celebrates the bottom-of-the-barrel cinematic taste buds of audiences (mainly Zoomers) who’ve made these two recently-released horror films into box-office legends.
Is it a good thing that Obsession and Backrooms have caught on and made so much dough? Yes, of course — any theatrical hit these days is good for the goose and the gander.
But what do these twin successes say about 2026 movie culture in general as well as the aesthetic or spiritual lives of the under-45 set?
They say that (a) a certain kind of subversive, high-octane element has risen out of YouTube (a good thing), but also that (b) Obsession fans, a group of whom I sat with in a theatre with a few days ago, aren’t especially hip or discerning. Some of them, no offense, sounded to me like under-educated serfs. A couple of dudes sitting behind me sounded like outright mongrels.
And I love this Chang sentence that appears at the top of paragraph #11:
Uhhm, Justin? The vast majority of dramas released in this country within the past two or three years (as well as a healthy percentage of those shown during last month’s Cannes Film Festival) highlighted white male cisgender villains…dudes “whose unexamined selfishness turns out to have horrific consequences for others.”
Straight white males are the reigning dramatic ogres of our age…objects of untethered mass loathing…clobbered recipients of ultra-negative judgments from an urban wokester generation that celebrates, in some circles at least, the babygirl aesthetic.
A John Lithgow quote from Jesse Green‘s three-month-old N.Y. Times profile of the 80-year-old actor…a compassionate, fair-minded thought if I’ve ever heard one:
“Good people are capable of bad things.”
What Lithgow meant when he said “bad” was behavior, thoughts or tossed-off twitter posts that elite know-it-alls regard as coarse or questionable or unsavory.
Is there one aspect of the woke-mob philosophy that even briefly considers this viewpoint? No, there is not. During their tyrannical reign of peak terror (2018 to 2024), wokeys believed in dunking the witch in the pond until dead…period.
I somehow missed, by the way, Lithgow’s admission in his 2011 book, “Drama,” that in 1977 he revelled in a year-long affair with Liv Ullmann. (It happened when they were costarring in a B’way revival of Anna Christie.) Lithgow was 32 and married; Ullman was 38 or 39. Imagine the acrobatic throbbing! Imagine the unhooked pots and pans clattering on the kitchen floor!