Though it may make some older generations want to jump out of their skin, the future of horror is on YouTube. With his leap from the social platform to the big screen, the internet sketch comic Curry Barker has joined Talk to Me’s Michael and Danny Philippou and 20-year-old Kane Parsons, whose highly anticipated debut Backrooms is due in cinemas later this month, to form a new frontier for the genre – one that’s as brutal as it is savvy.
Gone is any feeling of Gothic tenderness, of the misunderstood going bump in the night. Here, the generation exposed to what feels like only the very worst of the world has responded in kind, with horror in which punishment is swift, nasty, and arguably well deserved.
