If nothing else, the horror genre has always been one built on reinvention. The passage of time and socio-cultural transformation are constantly influencing trends, which means there’s an ocean of difference between the climate that gave us movies like the original Nightmare on Elm Street versus today’s outings like Obsession or Hokum. The mainstream horror of the ‘80s was defined by the slasher, the early 2000s by J-horror remakes and the rise of “torture” flicks, and the late-2010s and 2020s thus far have been dominated by allegory-heavy, arthouse-adjacent “elevated” horror.
The nature of that audience/artist ebb and flow in horror means that, like all studio filmmaking, it’s also beholden to the whims of what studios believe audiences have a taste for. Much in the way that Halloween inspired a wave of blade-wielding imitators and The Blair Witch Project led to a decade of vertigo-inducing camerawork, the success of 21-year-old Kane Parsons’ and A24’s Backrooms is already making ripples across the industry. Already a number of films based on creepypasta-lite internet horror legends have been greenlit from major studios, with some serious weight attached — but is the Hollywood machine about to run face first into a wall due to the communal storytelling nature of many of these concepts?
