• A24’s Backrooms opened to $9M in Thursday night previews — surpassing Scream 7’s $7.8M and John Wick: Chapter 4’s $8.9M, and approaching Eternals’ $9.5M — a stunning result for a horror film based on a viral internet meme directed by 20-year-old Kane Parsons
• The film stars Chiwetel Ejiofor as a struggling furniture store owner who discovers an interdimensional labyrinth beneath his shop — adapted from Parsons’ own hit YouTube Backrooms web series that became a cornerstone of internet horror culture
• Critical reception has been strong: Rotten Tomatoes reviews describe the film as “extraordinarily effective” atmospheric horror — Variety’s Owen Gleiberman wrote that “you sit back and settle into the enigmas and the grun[ge]” — and the film has been called one of the most interesting horror releases of the year
• Backrooms is projected to challenge or potentially upset The Mandalorian and Grogu at the box office this weekend — the Star Wars film took $100M over the Memorial Day holiday but was widely considered underwhelming for franchise expectations

The Backrooms were always going to make money. The question was how much — and Thursday night answered it emphatically. A24’s Backrooms opened to $9M in previews beginning at 4 PM, Deadline reported, surpassing Scream 7’s $7.8M and eclipsing John Wick: Chapter 4’s $8.9M. It sits just below Eternals’ $9.5M — a Marvel ensemble film — which makes the comparison all the more striking for what is, on paper, a low-key A24 horror release about a furniture salesman and a labyrinth. The internet meme has officially arrived as a box office force, per Deadline.

The film’s premise stays closer to the source material than you might expect from a mainstream theatrical release. Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Clark, a discount furniture store owner living in the store after a messy separation from his wife. While in the basement, Clark passes through a threshold into the Backrooms — an endless, fluorescent-lit labyrinth of identical yellow rooms that, in internet lore, represents the terrifying wrong-turn you can take out of ordinary reality. Renate Reinsve co-stars. The screenplay was written by Will Soodik, based on the web series that director Kane Parsons began making as a teenager and which accumulated hundreds of millions of views before he was old enough to vote, per the Sentinel Colorado.

What Critics Are Saying

The critical reception has matched the presale energy. Variety’s Owen Gleiberman called the film “extraordinarily effective” as atmospheric horror, writing that it generates genuine unease through craft rather than conventional shock. Rolling Out described it as a film that “burrows under the skin and stays there long after the credits roll” — placing it in the rare category of horror that relies on dread rather than cheap mechanics. Pajiba’s critic wrote that Backrooms “gripped me in ways I wasn’t immediately able to shake off,” and that the longer they sat with it, the more its intentions became clear, per Pajiba.

The film’s Rotten Tomatoes score has been described as great news for horror fans — though the Critics Consensus and full Popcornmeter were still pending as of Thursday evening. The reviews that have come in characterize Backrooms as one of the year’s most interesting horror releases: unsettling in a way that lingers, visually distinct, and carrying more thematic weight than its meme origins might suggest. For A24, which built its reputation on exactly this kind of elevated, difficult-to-categorize genre film, it reads as a signature release, per Collider.

The Internet-to-Blockbuster Pipeline

The box office projections heading into the weekend suggest Backrooms could challenge or outright upset The Mandalorian and Grogu, which took approximately $100M over the Memorial Day holiday but left industry observers underwhelmed — the consensus was that for a Star Wars film, that number is closer to Solo: A Star Wars Story territory than a genuine blockbuster. A strong Backrooms opening weekend would reshape the narrative heading into June. JoBlo noted that the comparison isn’t just statistical: Backrooms earned its preview number from a much smaller built-in fanbase than a Star Wars franchise title, making the per-theater performance potentially more impressive, per JoBlo.

What makes the result notable beyond the raw numbers is what it says about how horror audiences have evolved. The Backrooms as an internet phenomenon — creepypasta, YouTube short films, Reddit lore — built its following without any studio machinery. Kane Parsons made his web series on a camera as a teenager and turned it into one of the defining horror aesthetics of the early 2020s: liminal spaces, wrong-turn dread, the particular horror of a world that looks almost normal but isn’t. A24 acquiring and developing it into a theatrical feature with a real cast and a proper production budget was a calculated bet that that aesthetic had crossover potential. Thursday night’s $9M says it was right, per Rolling Stone.

For Parsons — who is 20 years old and making his feature debut — the numbers represent something different: the validation of an approach to filmmaking that began with a camera and an internet connection, not a film school application. The full opening weekend tracking will arrive over the next 48 hours and will give a clearer picture of where Backrooms lands. But the previews alone have already made it one of the most notable openings in A24’s history.

The post A24’s ‘Backrooms’ Opens to $9M in Previews — Beating ‘Scream 7’ and Rivaling ‘John Wick 4’ appeared first on Cream.

• A24’s Backrooms is in theaters now, directed by 20-year-old Kane Parsons (YouTube: Kane Pixels), whose original web series racked up 78 million views
• Chiwetel Ejiofor stars as Clark, a failing furniture store owner who stumbles through a wall and into an endless liminal nightmare; Renate Reinsve plays his therapist
• James Wan and Osgood Perkins are among the producers
• Critical consensus: the atmosphere and dread are genuinely exceptional — the storytelling is where reviewers are split
• Collider called it “near-flawless”; Polygon said it’s “the best horror movie since Weapons“; Hollywood Reporter called it “creepy but underbaked”

In 2019, someone posted a photo to 4chan. Just a photo — a big, carpeted room with fluorescent lights, everything cast in a sickly shade of yellow. A second poster gave it a name and a mythology in a single paragraph:

“If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms, where it’s nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in.”

That’s it. That was the whole thing. No author. No story. Just dread in paragraph form.

Five years later, a teenager named Kane Parsons turned it into a YouTube web series that got 78 million views. Now he’s 20, and A24 just released his feature film.

The Movie

Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is not doing well. His furniture store — Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire — has no customers. His wife kicked him out. He’s been sleeping in the shop and seeing a therapist named Mary (Renate Reinsve) to cope. The film is set in 1990 California, and the specificity of the period and setting gives it an anchored, lived-in feel before everything comes apart.

One night, checking the circuit breaker in the store’s basement, Clark walks through a wall.

What’s on the other side is the Backrooms: never-ending chambers lined with yellow wallpaper and fluorescent lighting, like vacant office spaces designed by someone who only half-remembered what offices look like. There are piles of furniture. Shrunken doors. A stop sign. A cardboard cutout with a cassette player saying hello in different languages. Clark eventually describes the place as though it was “made by a bunch of construction workers on acid.”

James Wan and Osgood Perkins are among the producers. The cast is genuinely arthouse-caliber for what started as a meme.

What Critics Are Saying

The reviews are split in an interesting way — not good-vs-bad, but more like: the first two acts versus the third.

Collider was the most effusive, calling it a “near-flawless horror film that demands to be seen” and pointing to the broader wave of YouTuber filmmakers making serious genre work — the Philippou Brothers with Talk to Me, Mark Fishbach’s Iron Lung — as evidence that Parsons isn’t an outlier. He’s the next wave.

Polygon was nearly as enthusiastic, putting it alongside Zach Cregger’s Weapons as the best horror of the year so far: “deeply unnerving… haunting… leaves lingering shivers and ongoing anxieties.” The key observation there is that the film is smart enough to leave mysteries intact — not every corner of the Backrooms needs to be explained, and Parsons knows it.

Hollywood Reporter took the more cautious read. Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve are bona fide arthouse stars, the studio is buzzy, the concept is genuinely unnerving — but the storytelling is “underbaked.” The Backrooms, as internet mythology, was always more atmosphere than narrative, and the film has trouble converting that into a satisfying third act.

CBR landed somewhere in the middle: the dread is real, the thread gets lost. MovieWeb used almost the same language — “eerie and atmospheric” but “loses its own message.”

The AP review cut to the core of it: “Where Backrooms came from is more interesting — and potentially meaningful — than the result.” That’s not a dismissal. It’s an acknowledgment that the origin story is genuinely remarkable and the film captures something genuine — it just can’t quite figure out what to do once it has you inside.

Why Kane Parsons Matters

To understand the scale of what Parsons has done, you have to understand where he started. His YouTube channel (Kane Pixels) began posting Backrooms shorts when he was still a teenager. The videos are found-footage fragments — mostly atmospheric, mostly unexplained, almost no conventional narrative. They suggest a larger world without building one. They scared people anyway. The most popular episode hit 78 million views.

CBR noted the context directly: “We’re in a veritable golden age of indie original horror, and 2026 might be its apex.” The year has already produced Iron Lung, Hokum, and Obsession. Backrooms is the one with the most mythology behind it and, now, the most debate in front of it.

Twenty years old. A24. Chiwetel Ejiofor. A 4chan post from 2019.

Whatever you think of how the film sticks its landing, that sentence is still going to need a minute to sink in.

The post A24’s Backrooms Reviews Are In: Kane Parsons Made a Horror Film at 20 That Critics Can’t Stop Arguing About appeared first on Cream.

• Two new atmospheric Resident Evil posters have been released, along with a behind-the-scenes featurette with director Zach Cregger.
• Cregger is emphatic: his film is a survival horror movie, not an action movie — a deliberate departure from the Milla Jovovich era.
• The story follows Bryan (Austin Abrams), an ordinary medical courier dropped into a nightmare version of Raccoon City.
• Cregger has never watched any of the previous Resident Evil films and says the movie is set alongside the events of Resident Evil 2.
• Resident Evil hits theaters September 18, 2026, co-written by Cregger and Shay Hatten.

Zach Cregger wants you to be scared. Not pumped. Not thrilled. Scared.

Sony has released two new posters and a behind-the-scenes featurette for the upcoming Resident Evil reboot, and the director of Barbarian and Weapons is using every bit of it to drive home exactly what kind of movie he’s making. “Resident Evil is kind of the flagship for survival horror,” Cregger says in the new video. “Horror — it’s not action.”

That’s a pointed statement, and it’s clearly intentional. The Milla Jovovich franchise — which ran for six films between 2002 and 2016 and grossed over $1 billion worldwide — was built almost entirely on kinetic action spectacle. Cregger is steering in the opposite direction, and he’s not being subtle about it.

The Philosophy: Dread Over Firepower

In the featurette, Cregger lays out his creative vision with the kind of specificity that should genuinely excite fans of the games. “What I love about survival horror games, and Resident Evil mostly, is this overwhelming feeling of dread,” he explains. “I have to go down this long, dark passageway. I have two shotgun shells. I know there’s a lot of sh*t in there waiting for me, and I know it’s really bad, but I have to go.”

That image — two shells, long dark corridor, no good options — is basically the emotional DNA of the entire franchise. And Cregger, who says he’s logged thousands of hours in the games, is chasing that feeling rather than the franchise’s mythology.

His lead character reflects that. Austin Abrams plays Bryan, a medical courier — not a trained soldier, not a special ops veteran. Just a guy. “I wanted this movie to tell the story of what would happen if some idiot like me were dropped into the world of a RE game,” Cregger said. “I’m terrible with guns. I don’t know how any of them work. I’d miss like 99 percent of all of my shots.” The point is that Bryan’s terror is relatable precisely because he has no business surviving any of this. That, Cregger argues, makes every near-miss more interesting than watching Leon Kennedy mow through zombies with practiced efficiency.

Notably, Cregger has never watched any of the previous Resident Evil films — not a single one. “The reason I didn’t see them is that I was such a fan of the games, and they just didn’t look like the games to me,” he said. “It was so obvious that they were not the games that I was like, ‘It’s not for me.'” That blank slate approach means his frame of reference is entirely the source material, not the adaptations that came before.

Where This Story Actually Lives

While Cregger isn’t adapting any specific game, he’s been clear about where his film fits in the franchise’s world. “I feel like this movie takes place alongside the events of Resident Evil 2,” he’s said. “I like to think that everything that’s going on in the police station could be happening in this world. This is just another dude on another mission on the other side of town.” The new featurette even includes a point-of-view shot of a gun barrel inside a lab that looks like it was pulled straight from the games themselves — a deliberate visual nod to the franchise’s signature perspective.

Filming took place in Prague, with the city’s streets transformed into Raccoon City, and the project is now in post-production with its September release date fast approaching.

Constantin Film CEO Oliver Berben has already been vocal about the creative reset. “With Resident Evil, we have had an incredible journey with one of the most successful international IPs,” he said. “And now we are creating something new — not just a new story idea, but to allow a new generation to take the IP into their own hands and form something different.” He acknowledged the film is “far away from everything that is connected to Resident Evil,” framing that distance as a feature, not a bug.

The Posters (and the Fan Reaction)

The two new one-sheets, shared on the franchise’s official X account, are doing real work. The first shows a car on a dark forest road, headlights cutting through the dark toward what appears to be an infected woman — and if you look closely, the vehicle’s headlights and red taillights form a subtle Umbrella Corporation logo. It’s a small detail, but it’s the kind of thing that signals Cregger knows exactly what he’s doing. The second poster takes a behind-the-back view of Bryan walking into a snow-covered Raccoon City, quiet and ominous in a way that feels more like a nightmare than an action movie setup.

Not everyone is convinced. Fans have been vocal since the first trailer dropped, with some arguing the film barely resembles the franchise it’s named after. “Not a RE movie, just another spin off of the director’s universe with the name of Resident Evil to sell tickets,” one X user wrote. Another pointed out that without the title card, nothing in the posters would read as Resident Evil at all.

It’s a fair tension. The games have iconic characters — Leon Kennedy, Claire Redfield, Ada Wong — and decades of deeply invested fans who want to see those stories told on screen. Cregger’s Bryan is none of that. He’s an original character in a story that uses the franchise’s world as a backdrop rather than its lore as a script.

But here’s the counter-argument: every previous live-action Resident Evil adaptation has a “Rotten” score on Rotten Tomatoes. The Jovovich series topped out at 38% with The Final Chapter. The 2021 reboot, Welcome to Raccoon City, earned just $42 million worldwide. The formula hasn’t worked — not critically, not for the fans who wanted something faithful. Cregger’s Barbarian pulled $45 million on a micro-budget with zero franchise recognition. Weapons, his follow-up, earned $270 million and an Oscar. The guy knows how to make horror land.

The cast around Abrams is strong: Paul Walter Hauser (Cobra Kai), Zach Cherry (Severance), and Kali Reis (True Detective: Night Country) round out the ensemble, with Cherry reportedly playing a hospital scientist and Reis in an ex-military role that was originally written for a man.

Resident Evil, co-written by Cregger and Shay Hatten, opens in theaters September 18, 2026. Whether fans come around before then or not, Cregger sounds like a man who made exactly the movie he set out to make — and that alone makes it worth watching.

The post Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil Is Horror, Not Action appeared first on Cream.

• The first teaser trailer for Victorian Psycho dropped May 21 as the film premiered at Cannes’ Un Certain Regard
• Maika Monroe plays Winifred Notty, a murderous governess at a remote gothic manor in 1858
• The film was originally set to star Margaret Qualley, who dropped out just days before production began
• Director Zachary Wigon describes the film as “demented” — blending horror, pitch-black comedy, and fury
• Bleecker Street will release Victorian Psycho in U.S. theaters this fall

Maika Monroe has made a career out of making audiences deeply, viscerally uncomfortable — and her latest role looks like it might be her most unsettling yet. The first teaser trailer for Victorian Psycho arrived on May 21, the same day the gothic horror film made its world premiere in the Un Certain Regard section of the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, and it is exactly as unhinged as the title promises.

Monroe plays Winifred Notty, a young governess who arrives at the sweeping, remote Ensor House in 1858 to teach the children of the well-to-do Pounds family. It doesn’t take long before staff begin to mysteriously disappear — and suspicion starts circling the eccentric new arrival. The teaser makes little effort to hide where that suspicion leads. Set to the jarring, anachronistic punk needle drop “Throw Yourself to the Sword” by Die Spitz, it builds around a genuinely chilling monologue Monroe delivers to her young charges.

“What is the most important thing in life? Knowing good from evil,” Monroe intones in voiceover. “But what is evil? Can you touch it? Can you smell it? Can you taste it on your tongue? Can you feel it rolling around inside you? Squeezing hard?”

It’s the kind of line that makes you want to check that your doors are locked.

From ‘It Follows’ to Period Horror — Monroe’s Darkest Role Yet

Monroe has been building toward something like this for a decade. She broke through in the slow-burn nightmare of It Follows, then cemented her scream queen status opposite Nicolas Cage in Neon’s Longlegs last year. But by her own account, Winifred Notty is a different beast entirely.

“It terrified me,” Monroe told THR’s David Canfield in an exclusive first-look interview. “I knew that it would be the hardest role that I have ever done — and so incredibly different from anything I’ve ever done.”

“There’s always a little part of me in roles that I do, something that I can ground it with or connect it with within my own personal life — but this role was really a departure from that,” she continued. “It was working from the ground up, creating this character where I couldn’t rely on my own self. It really, in the most magical way, took a toll on me. I felt it every day.”

Director Zachary Wigon says Monroe’s particular screen quality was exactly what drew him to casting her. “One of the interesting things about Maika is her incredible ability to have a restrained, contained intensity on screen,” he told Variety. “There’s this sense with her screen persona that there’s something very intense going on behind her eyes, in her head, that you’re not able to track. Instinctively, I felt it would be compelling to cast her as a serial killer, because we’re so curious about what’s going on in their head.”

Winifred, Wigon explains, is a character defined by a brutal paradox. “She will never belong — and she will never stop wanting to belong,” he said of the governess who is always an outsider desperate to be an insider. That tension, he suggests, is at the heart of everything.

A ‘Demented’ Vision — and a Bumpy Road to Get Here

The film is Wigon’s third feature, following his 2014 debut The Heart Machine and the claustrophobic 2022 two-hander Sanctuary, which starred Christopher Abbott and Margaret Qualley. It was actually Qualley who was originally attached to lead Victorian Psycho — she’d even been publicly working on her British accent in preparation for the role. Then, just days before production was set to begin in early 2025, she had to exit the project. Monroe stepped in, the film shot in Ireland, and the rest is Cannes history.

The screenplay was adapted by Virginia Feito from her own 2025 novel of the same name — Feito is also known for her debut Mrs. March — and Wigon says discovering her unpublished manuscript was what pulled him into the project in the first place. “What really struck me was every page was filled with this incredible intensity and anger,” he said. “The novel changed forms a little bit from that early draft that I read to what she ended up publishing. But the anger and the intensity of it was so acute that the experience was like being gripped on every page. At the same time, it was really funny. I’d never read anything like it before.”

That tonal mix — horror, black comedy, empathy, outrage — is intentional. Wigon’s word for the film is “demented.” “It’s a big tent,” he said. “Demented encompasses scary, but also funny and outrageous.” Getting the audience to root for a murderous protagonist, he says, comes down to keeping them locked inside her subjectivity: “Even if you are not rooting for them, when you recognize how aberrant and awful their behavior is, if you’re connected to their subjectivity, you understand why, to some degree, they feel the way they feel.”

The film has already been rated R by the MPA for strong bloody violence and brief sexual material — which tracks with everything the teaser is selling.

Alongside Monroe, the cast includes Thomasin McKenzie as a nursemaid at Ensor House who befriends the new governess, Ruth Wilson, Jason Isaacs, Jacobi Jupe, Amy De Bhrun, and Evie Templeton as Miss Drusilla Pounds — described as “the picture of a young lady-in-the-making, but inwardly, she carries an intensity and darkness beyond her years.” The film is produced by Dan Kagan, Liz Siegal, and Sebastien Raybaud — the same producing team behind Longlegs — alongside Wigon, with Bleecker Street handling U.S. distribution.

Victorian Psycho arrives in American theaters this fall. If the teaser is any indication, Winifred Notty is going to be living rent-free in a lot of heads between now and then.

The post Maika Monroe Is Terrifying in Victorian Psycho Teaser appeared first on Cream.

• Obsession became the cheapest film to top the box office in 17 years, beating out the record set by Paranormal Activity in 2009.
• The film was made for just $750,000 and has already earned $27 million worldwide after only a few days in release.
• Director Curry Barker is a former YouTuber making his theatrical debut, continuing a growing Hollywood trend.
• Star Inde Navarrette’s performance is generating serious awards buzz, rare for a horror film.
• The Mandalorian and Grogu looms next weekend, but Obsession’s word-of-mouth momentum is already extraordinary.

Obsession just made box office history — and it did it on a budget that most Hollywood productions spend on craft services.

The horror film from director Curry Barker hit number one at the box office on Monday, making it the cheapest movie to top the charts in 17 years. The last film to do it? Paranormal Activity in 2009 — a film that famously cost $15,000, was shot in a single house, and became one of the most unlikely blockbusters in cinema history. Obsession’s reported budget of $750,000 is higher than that, but in the landscape of wide-release studio films, it’s essentially the same category: a miracle.

On Monday alone, Obsession earned $2.9 million, pushing its worldwide total to $27 million. That’s after opening to $16.1 million domestically over the weekend — good enough for third place behind the Michael biopic ($26.1 million) and The Devil Wears Prada 2 ($18 million), but the highest new opening of the weekend and well above pre-release tracking that had it topping out around $15 million. Add in $7 million overseas and a $2.6 million Wednesday preview haul on premium large format screens, and the numbers tell a story that’s hard to believe.

Obsession was produced for less than $1 million. Focus Features acquired it out of TIFF for a reported $14 million — an aggressive bet that is paying off in a very big way.

The Movie Everyone’s Talking About

The film follows Bear (Michael Johnston), a guy with a crush who uses a mysterious toy called the “One Wish Willow” to wish that his friend Nikki loved him “more than anyone in the world.” As you might expect, the results are not what he had in mind. Inde Navarrette plays Nikki — and the performance has become the story within the story. She goes from overbearing romantic to full psychopath, sometimes within the same scene, and audiences and critics alike have been floored by it. The film holds a 94% on Rotten Tomatoes from both critics and audiences, and earned a rare A- CinemaScore — the kind of score that tells you word of mouth isn’t just going to be good, it’s going to be relentless.

/Film called it a “confident crowd-pleaser.” IndieWire’s review out of TIFF noted the film’s chilling relatability — that it dares to challenge men in the audience to ask whether they’re capable of doing what Bear does, effectively stripping away another person’s autonomy. That discomfort is clearly landing. Awards conversations for Navarrette have already started, which is almost unheard of for a horror film at this stage.

The audience breakdown is also striking. About 75% of viewers were under 35, with the 25-34 bracket being the largest single group. The film skewed slightly male, but 41% of the audience was female, and 32% was Hispanic. On Saturday to Sunday, it dropped just 11% — a stat that exhibitors notice, because it signals a film that people are recommending to each other in real time.

The YouTuber Who Shocked Hollywood

Barker came up as a content creator on YouTube, and ahead of the film’s release, he was clear about what kind of filmmaker he wanted to be. “I don’t want to put myself in a box,” he said. “The movies I want to make are the ones I would be excited to go see at the theater.” Clearly, a lot of people felt the same way.

He’s part of a growing wave. Markiplier’s Iron Lung brought in $50 million on a $3–4 million budget. Danny and Michael Philippou’s Talk to Me earned $92 million on $4.5 million. And now A24 is betting on Kane Parsons’ Backrooms — born from a viral YouTube series — to be one of its biggest releases ever. But none of those had a budget as low as Obsession’s, and none generated this kind of awards conversation.

Focus Features ran a marketing campaign that matched the film’s energy. Cryptic billboards. A campaign where fans could sign up to receive texts from Nikki — 30,000 people did. A series of Discord quests targeting gamers that drew over a million participants in just over a week. AMC secured Dolby Cinema screens and offered an exclusive popcorn tin. Alamo Drafthouse named it an Alamo Recommend and hosted a live-streamed Q&A with Barker. It was old-school and new-school at once, and it worked.

“If we really want to make exhibition feel whole again, we need more movies like Obsession,” Focus Features distribution chief Lisa Bunnell said. “It’s nice to see a movie that surprises people and shows them there’s a lot of talent out there left to be seen. We’re taking seriously that people are discovering talent and content in new ways, and instead of dismissing it we’re saying, how are we able to take this to the big screen and really showcase the talent? I think that inspires young people. And if you can give them hope … that’s a beautiful thing.”

What Comes Next

The comparison points being thrown around right now are Hereditary — which opened to $13.5 million and finished with $90.3 million worldwide — and Barbarian, which opened to $10.5 million and closed at $46.1 million. Both were buzzy, word-of-mouth horror films from first-time directors. Obsession opened bigger than either of them.

The immediate challenge is The Mandalorian and Grogu, the first Star Wars film in seven years, which is projected to open somewhere between $80–100 million next weekend. That’s a wall. But Obsession’s Saturday-to-Sunday hold and its Monday surge suggest this isn’t a film that collapses — it builds. Paranormal Activity opened to just $77,000, lost steam, then came back to win the box office in its fifth weekend. The situations aren’t identical, but the DNA is familiar.

Barker already has two more horror films in development, a comedy, and an original take on Texas Chainsaw Massacre. He’s also been talking about Obsession sequels and an anthology series exploring different wishes and their consequences. For now, all eyes are on this weekend — and whether a little horror movie about a wish gone wrong can hold its own against Baby Yoda.

The post Obsession Sets a 17-Year Box Office Record appeared first on Cream.

• Horror is having a major creative moment in 2026, with studios embracing experimentation over formula
• Cosmic horror — think psychological dread over gore — is emerging as one of the genre’s most compelling subgenres
• Underseen gems like The Empty Man, Event Horizon, and Resolution deserve way more attention than they’ve gotten
• Markiplier’s passion project Iron Lung shocked everyone with a $50M box office haul on a $3M budget
• Whether you’re a horror newbie or a lifelong fan, there’s never been a better time to dive in

Horror is one of the oldest storytelling traditions we have — and right now, it’s having one of its best years in recent memory. We’re nearly halfway through 2026 and the genre has already delivered films that are socially sharp, genuinely strange, sometimes funny, and deeply unsettling in ways that stick with you long after the credits roll. If you’ve been meaning to get into horror, or you’re a longtime fan looking to fill in some gaps, this is the moment.

The genre spent a good chunk of the late 2010s and early 2020s locked into one dominant mode — internal suffering, trauma as metaphor, prestige dread. That era produced some genuinely great films. But 2025 signaled a turn, and 2026 has confirmed it: horror is looser now, more playful, less interested in fitting a single trendy mold. Studios are finally catching up to what horror fans have always known — that scary movies are one of the most reliable theatrical genres there is, and the storytelling potential is basically unlimited.

The Case for Cosmic Horror

If you want to understand where horror’s most interesting ideas are living right now, start with cosmic horror. Also called Lovecraftian horror, it trades gore and jump scares for something much harder to shake: the feeling that reality is a thin shell, easily cracked, and that the universe is indifferent — or worse, actively hostile — to human existence. Done right, cosmic horror doesn’t just scare you in the moment. It follows you home.

The Empty Man is the perfect entry point. Released in 2020 during the worst possible theatrical window — peak COVID — the supernatural thriller was quietly extraordinary and almost no one saw it in theaters. Based on Cullen Bunn’s comic book series and written and directed by David Prior, the film plays on everything you think you know about cults and possession, then dismantles it. Its 20-minute opening sequence is as good as anything in recent horror, and the ending delivers a genuine existential crisis. It’s found its audience on streaming — a respectable 73% on Rotten Tomatoes and a devoted cult following — but it deserves to be talked about in the same breath as the genre’s best.

Event Horizon had an even rougher debut. The 1997 sci-fi horror film — Laurence Fishburne and Sam Neill battling a sentient, dimension-hopping spacecraft — landed in a crowded year that included Scream 2 and I Know What You Did Last Summer, and got buried. Its 36% RT score remains a crime. Paul W.S. Anderson directed from Philip Eisner’s screenplay, and the film’s dark, visceral imagery and its knack for weaponizing guilt and trauma against its characters have earned it genuine cult status over the decades. If you haven’t seen it, fix that.

Resolution, the 2012 mystery-horror from directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, takes a more meta approach — it’s essentially a film about the audience’s own hunger for a satisfying ending, using a sentient entity that traps its victims in a loop as a mirror for how demanding and hard-to-please viewers can be. Smart, unsettling, and armed with an 81% RT score and multiple festival wins, it uses photographs and video footage to deliver its horror rather than constant in-your-face violence. A single image, it turns out, can do more psychological damage than a dozen jump scares.

The Surprise Hit Nobody Saw Coming

Then there’s Iron Lung — arguably the most unexpected horror story of 2026, and not just because of what happens on screen. The film was directed, written, produced, and starred in by YouTuber Markiplier (Mark Fischbach), and it would’ve been easy to dismiss it on those credentials alone. Nobody did after opening weekend. The video game adaptation — based on David Szymanski’s indie game — follows survivors of an apocalypse searching for resources on a moon with an ocean of blood, and it grossed over $50 million against a self-financed $3 million budget.

The film leans hard into slow burn, practical effects, and 80,000 gallons of fake blood to build toward a genuinely gruesome climax. It’s claustrophobic in the best possible way. The 62% RT score undersells it — this is a movie that gets under your skin and stays there.

When Less Monster Means More Terror

One of the smartest tricks in horror’s playbook is restraint — and some of the genre’s most effective films barely show you the thing that’s supposed to be scary at all. The enemy you can’t fully see is almost always more terrifying than the one you can. Distorted glimpses, strange sounds, a character’s terrified reaction — these force the audience to fill in the blanks with whatever their imagination conjures, which is usually worse than anything a filmmaker could show. The best horror directors understand this instinctively, which is part of why films like The Blair Witch Project still work: the witch never fully appears, and that absence is the whole point.

Horror Rooted in Real Life

There’s a specific kind of dread that comes from knowing something actually happened. Horror films inspired by real events carry extra weight — the Lutz family’s experiences at the Amityville house, the Perron family haunting investigated by Ed and Lorraine Warren, the alleged 1949 exorcism of a boy known as Roland Doe that inspired The Exorcist. These stories blur the line between what we can explain and what we can’t, and filmmakers have been mining that discomfort for decades. It works because the horror isn’t just fictional — somewhere, it was real enough that people wrote it down and couldn’t stop talking about it.

Where to Start If You’re New to All This

Horror has been around since the earliest days of cinema, which means the archive is enormous and can feel genuinely overwhelming. The good news is that the genre rewards exploration — each film tends to open a door to five more. The black-and-white classics of the early sound era, the slashers of the ’70s and ’80s, the post-Scream self-awareness of the ’90s, the elevated horror wave of the 2010s, and now this current era of joyful experimentation — each cycle has its masterworks, and they’re all still there waiting.

Start with something that sounds interesting to you specifically. Cosmic dread? The Empty Man. Practical effects and claustrophobia? Iron Lung. Space-set psychological horror? Event Horizon. Real-life foundations? The Conjuring or The Exorcist. Meta-horror that makes you think? Resolution. The genre is bigger and stranger and more welcoming than its reputation sometimes suggests.

And if you want a guided tour through 2026’s best so far — including Lee Cronin’s The Mummy and the buzzy new indie Obsession from Alabama filmmaker Curry Barker — The Ringer’s The Big Picture podcast recently devoted a full episode to exactly that conversation, including a deep dive on which directors are running the genre right now.

Horror is unpredictable again. That’s the best thing that could’ve happened to it.

The post The Best Horror Movies You Need to Watch Right Now appeared first on Cream.

• Sam Raimi will direct Magic for Lionsgate, a remake of the 1978 cult horror classic starring Anthony Hopkins
• The original film featured Hopkins as a ventriloquist whose dummy Fats begins murderously taking control of his life
• Screenwriters Mark Swift and Damian Shannon, who penned Freddy vs. Jason and the Friday the 13th remake, wrote the new script
• Raimi’s last film, Send Help, hit #1 at the box office for two consecutive weeks and grossed nearly $100 million worldwide
• Lionsgate chair Adam Fogelson called Raimi “the dream director” for the project

Sam Raimi is heading back into horror — and this time, he’s bringing a dummy with him. Lionsgate has set the Evil Dead and Spider-Man filmmaker to direct Magic, a modern adaptation of William Goldman’s novel that was first brought to the screen in 1978 with Anthony Hopkins in one of his most unsettling early performances.

The original film, directed by Richard Attenborough and scripted by Goldman from his own novel, starred Hopkins as Corky, a magician who rises to fame alongside his ventriloquist’s dummy, the obnoxious and wisecracking Fats. When Corky is on the verge of landing his own network television deal, he panics — terrified of exposing the fragile state of his mental health — and flees to the Catskills, where he tries to rekindle a high school romance. Fats, meanwhile, begins murderously taking control of the situation. The film also starred Ann-Margret and Burgess Meredith, and Hopkins’ performance was the kind of slow-burn, psychologically unraveling work that hinted at everything he’d later deliver in The Silence of the Lambs.

Raimi was already attached to produce the remake — he’d set it up at Lionsgate last year — but he’s now stepping into the director’s chair as well. Producing alongside him are Roy Lee (whose credits include It and the recent Weapons), Chris Hammond, and Tim Sullivan, the latter two having long championed the project and tracked down the original rights to get it off the ground. Raimi Productions’ Zainab Azizi will also produce. Nathan Kahane, Paul Fishkin, and Andrew Childs for Vertigo will executive produce. Meredith Wieck and Pavan Kalidindi are overseeing the project for Lionsgate.

“Sam is the dream director for this project — in fact, his coming aboard represents one of the truly great matches of director and material,” said Adam Fogelson, chair of Lionsgate Motion Picture Group. “The script is fantastic, and we could not be more excited to see Sam’s direction and creative vision take it to another level. We are absolutely thrilled he has chosen to direct the film.”

A Horror Dream Team Reunites

The script comes from Mark Swift and Damian Shannon, who are no strangers to the genre — they previously wrote Freddy vs. Jason and the 2009 Friday the 13th remake. More recently, they wrote Send Help for Raimi and Azizi, which makes this a full creative reunion for the team.

Send Help, Raimi’s twisty survival thriller released through 20th Century Studios/Disney earlier this year with Rachel McAdams and Dylan O’Brien, was a genuine box office success story — it topped the charts for two consecutive weekends and pulled in nearly $100 million worldwide. That momentum clearly gives Raimi some serious heat heading into this next chapter.

For fans of Raimi’s work, the fit here is almost obvious in hindsight. The man who built his career on the boundary between horror and dark comedy, who gave us Ash Williams and his possessed hand, who understands better than almost anyone how to make an audience laugh and scream in the same breath — putting him behind a story about a man who can’t tell where he ends and his puppet begins feels less like a casting decision and more like an inevitability.

No production timeline or cast has been announced yet, but with the script in place and Raimi officially on board, Magic is very much in motion. The dummy is ready. Whether we are is another question entirely.

The post Sam Raimi to Direct ‘Magic’ Remake at Lionsgate appeared first on Cream.

• Obsession earned $2.6M in Thursday-Wednesday previews, topping Smile’s $2M preview number before its $22.6M opening.
• The film was made for just $750,000 — and Focus Features bought it for $15 million after its TIFF debut.
• Director Curry Barker is a YouTube filmmaker making his big-screen debut with the romantic horror film.
• Obsession holds a 95% critics score and 96% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes heading into opening weekend.
• The film is projected to earn between $9.5M and $14.5M in its domestic opening weekend.

Obsession is arriving in theaters this weekend with serious momentum behind it — and the early numbers are backing up the hype. The romantic horror film from first-time big-screen director Curry Barker pulled in $2.6 million in previews spanning Thursday night through Wednesday shows, a figure that already puts it ahead of where Paramount’s Smile stood before that film opened to $22.6 million.

For a movie that cost $750,000 to make, that’s a pretty stunning place to be.

Barker — who built his following through his YouTube channel “that’s a bad idea” — made the film on a shoestring, then watched his life change overnight when Focus Features and Blumhouse picked it up for $15 million following its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2025. “That’s the moment my life changed,” Barker said in a recent New Yorker featurette. The film’s actual budget — which he confirmed at $750,000 — is even lower than the $1 million figure previously reported by The Hollywood Reporter.

The movie follows Baron “Bear” Bailey (Michael Johnston), a young man who comes across a trinket that grants him the ability to wish the girl of his dreams — his co-worker and childhood friend Nikki Freeman (Inde Navarrette) — into falling in love with him. As you’d expect, chaos follows. The film almost earned an NC-17 rating due to one particularly violent scene that had to be toned down before release.

It’s now booked at 2,542 locations, including 435 premium large-format screens — a wide release footprint that makes its microscopic budget feel almost absurd in context.

Critics and Audiences Are All In

Obsession is riding into the weekend with a 95% Certified Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 110 reviews, alongside a 96% audience score. What makes those numbers even more remarkable is the timeline: the film allowed critics to share scores as early as March, when it briefly hit 97% — which Forbes noted would make it the best-reviewed wide-release film of 2026 at that point. It’s dipped a few points since more reviews came in, but the reception has stayed overwhelmingly positive.

Its closest comps in the indie horror space are A24’s Heretic and Talk to Me, both of which opened to $1.2M in Friday previews before earning $10.8M and $10.4M respectively in their opening weekends. Obsession has already cleared both of those preview marks.

Current box office projections put the film at around $11 million for its opening weekend domestically, with a range of $9.5M to $14.5M according to BoxOfficeTheory — a significant jump from the $7M estimate when tracking first began, and miles ahead of an early BoxOffice Pro range of just $4M to $6M. Given its $750,000 budget, the film technically only needs to gross $1.8 million to break even on production costs alone, meaning this weekend’s haul will already be a massive win before a single international dollar is counted.

What It’s Up Against This Weekend

The bigger question heading into the weekend is whether Obsession can shake up a box office that was shaping up to be a two-horse race. Lionsgate’s Michael is heading into its fourth weekend, and 20th Century Studios’ Devil Wears Prada 2 is in its third — both were tracking north of $20 million each before Obsession’s preview numbers landed. New Line’s Mortal Kombat 2 is also still in the mix, though it’s expected to drop around 60% to roughly $15M.

Also opening this weekend are Guy Ritchie’s In the Grey — starring Henry Cavill, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Eiza González as a covert ops team on a near-impossible heist mission — and Is God Is, the feature directorial debut of Aleshea Harris, adapted from her award-winning stage play and starring Kara Young, Mallori Johnson, Janelle Monáe, and Sterling K. Brown. Is God Is is sitting at an extraordinary 98% on Rotten Tomatoes. Neither is expected to challenge Obsession’s numbers this weekend, but both are generating serious critical attention.

Looking further ahead, Obsession will face two horror releases in the coming weeks — Paramount’s Passenger and A24’s Backrooms — so this opening weekend matters. The town is clearly paying close attention to Barker: beyond Obsession, his follow-up film starring Aaron Paul has already landed at Focus Features, and he’s set to direct a new Texas Chainsaw Massacre movie for A24.

For now, though, all eyes are on this weekend. A $2.6M preview haul from a film that cost less than most music videos to produce is the kind of story Hollywood genuinely loves — and it’s only just getting started.

The post Obsession Earns $2.6M in Previews Before Opening Weekend appeared first on Cream.

• Blumhouse horror film Obsession is now in theaters from Focus Features, which acquired it for $14 million after its TIFF debut
• Director Curry Barker, 26, is a YouTuber-turned-filmmaker whose debut cost $800 — this one cost $750,000
• Inde Navarrette delivers a widely praised star-making performance as Nikki, a woman supernaturally obsessed with her friend
• Michael Johnston co-stars as Bear, the lovelorn music store worker whose reckless wish sets the horror in motion
• Barker already has a Blumhouse follow-up in post-production and an A24 Texas Chainsaw Massacre reworking in the pipeline

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There’s a moment in Obsession where Bear, the film’s hapless, lovestruck protagonist, looks at the supernatural nightmare he’s created and says quietly, \”This is all I’ve ever wanted.\” It’s funny. It’s heartbreaking. And it tells you everything you need to know about why this movie works.

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Obsession — written and directed by 26-year-old wunderkind Curry Barker and now in theaters from Focus Features — is the kind of horror film that sneaks up on you. It looks, on the surface, like a simple \”be careful what you wish for\” yarn. And it is. But it’s also a sharp, darkly funny, genuinely unnerving piece of work that has critics calling it one of the best horror films of the year, and introducing the world to a performer who’s been hiding in plain sight on TV for years.

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That performer is Inde Navarrette, and after this weekend, nobody’s going to forget her name.

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The Setup: One Wish, Infinite Consequences

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Bear (Michael Johnston, known from MTV’s Teen Wolf) is a shy, sensitive music store employee — the kind of guy who rehearses his heartfelt confession of love to a random waitress because any woman’s opinion will do. He’s been quietly obsessing over his co-worker and childhood friend Nikki (Navarrette, previously best known for 13 Reasons Why and The CW’s Superman & Lois) for years, but can’t find the nerve to say so. After fumbling yet another chance to tell her how he feels, he wanders into a new-age crystal shop and picks up a kitschy novelty toy called a One Wish Willow — a flimsy little rod from the 1960s that promises to grant its owner one wish when snapped in half. The cashier warns him that most customers have complained about the results.

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He snaps it anyway. He wishes that Nikki would love him \”more than anything in the f—ing world.\”

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You can probably guess what happens next. And that predictability, several critics note, is actually part of the film’s strange power — you know exactly where this is going, and yet Barker makes you squirm the whole way there.

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Almost immediately, Nikki shows up at Bear’s door. She kisses him. She moves in. She is, to put it plainly, extremely into him — between bouts of vigorous sex and mawkish couple talk. The problem is that this new Nikki occasionally snaps back into her old self and screams in utter terror before the spell reasserts itself. She spends an entire day rooted in one spot so she’s guaranteed to be waiting when Bear gets home from work. She seals the front door with duct tape. She fashions something deeply disturbing out of his dead cat.

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\”This isn’t anything like how Bear imagined it would be,\” as one reviewer put it. \”Yet he happily sleeps with her anyway.\”

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Inde Navarrette Is the Reason to See This Movie

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Every critic who’s seen Obsession agrees on one thing: Navarrette is extraordinary. The role asks her to be funny, terrifying, heartbreaking, and physically unnerving, sometimes within the same scene, and she delivers on every count.

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Portraying Nikki as genuinely, disturbingly obsessed — without tipping into cartoonish camp — is a tightrope act. Navarrette walks it with precision. One moment she’s sulking so intensely it’s almost funny. The next, she’s unfurling a twisted fairy tale that leaves everyone in disturbed silence. Then she’s dancing while covered in blood, or screaming so hard your throat aches in sympathy. There’s a possession element to her performance — strange physicality, odd facial glitches, muscle spasms — that reviewers compare to something genuinely inhuman, without going full Exorcist contortion.

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Cinematographer Taylor Clemons frequently keeps Navarrette’s face out of frame, cropped or obscured by shadow. One review calls it \”an odd choice, as the actor’s so skilled you feel like you’re missing something.\” But her physicality transcends the framing. When the real Nikki briefly breaks through the curse — desperate, depleted, scrambling for escape — the performance becomes genuinely heartbreaking. That emotional weight, critics say, is what elevates Obsession beyond a neat genre exercise.

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\”She’s playing both the victim and the tormentor,\” one critic wrote, \”and she navigates both sides of Nikki’s personality.\” Another called her \”scream queen material.\” IndieWire went further, calling it \”one of the more physically and emotionally taxing horror leads to come down the pike in a while.\”

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Johnston holds his own opposite her — effectively conveying Bear’s sweetly moony yearning in the early scenes and his slowly dawning horror as things spiral. In one bedroom scene, he reportedly pulls off the feat of looking entirely thrilled and utterly miserable at the same time. It’s the kind of detail that makes you realize there’s more going on here than your average fright flick.

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The Bigger Picture: What Barker Is Really Saying

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The film works as a monkey’s paw horror story. It also works as a wickedly sharp dissection of modern male loneliness, the \”nice guy\” myth, and the entitled logic underneath it. Bear isn’t a monster in his own mind — he’s the romantic hero of his own story, a sensitive guy who just wants the girl. What he actually does, as his friends and the film’s camera make increasingly clear, is use a supernatural device like a roofie, then reap the rewards while Nikki is stripped of agency and bodily control.

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\”The most terrifying thing for a young man these days,\” one critic observed after watching young men flinch and gasp at the LA premiere, \”is an emotionally unregulated and unpredictable woman.\” Barker, to his credit, seems to know exactly what he’s doing with that fear — pointing the lens back at the audience and asking the uncomfortable question: how many \”good guys\” in the theater could be tempted to do what Bear did?

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The film is savvy enough not to let Bear fully off the hook. His social circle sees what he’s done. Invitations stop coming. Friends drift away. Several characters explicitly lecture him about his responsibility to Nikki. The horror at the center of Obsession, IndieWire argues, isn’t just the supernatural curse — it’s the very contemporary male fear of being the guy everyone knows took advantage of someone.

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Where some critics push back is in the third act, where the film’s feminist critique gets complicated by its own visual choices. Several reviewers note that the camera lingers on female bodies in ways that feel less like commentary and more like the exploitation it’s supposedly critiquing. \”Barker undercuts the message of anti-misogyny through third-act violence,\” Mashable wrote, pointing to scenes where female characters are brutalized in graphic detail that serves no apparent narrative purpose. It’s a legitimate tension the film never fully resolves.

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The tonal wobbles are real too — some jokey bits, including an inexplicable argument with a shop clerk and a jaunty closing credits song, land awkwardly. And the film is admittedly overlong for a premise this lean, with scenes so dimly lit that Navarrette’s face is sometimes lost entirely.

\n\h2>A Director to Watch — Closely

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What’s remarkable about Obsession is the distance it represents from where Barker started. Less than two years ago, he and collaborator Cooper Tomlinson (who co-stars here as Bear’s loutish best friend Ian) were making horror-comedy shorts for their YouTube channel \”That’s a Bad Idea.\” Their feature debut, Milk & Serial — a found-footage horror sendup of YouTube prank culture — cost a reported $800. It was a clever calling card, if not a fully realized film.

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Obsession cost $750,000 and has the kind of polished confidence that puts major studio efforts to shame. Focus Features — the distributor behind Nosferatu — spent $14 million acquiring it after its buzzy Midnight Madness premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. Jason Blum is attached as executive producer. Shooting has already wrapped on Barker’s next Blumhouse feature, Anything but Ghosts, and an A24 reworking of Texas Chainsaw Massacre is in the offing.

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The film also has a lovely sense of place — Bear and Nikki work at Cassell’s Music, the beloved independent Los Angeles-area music store that appeared in Wayne’s World and recently closed after 78 years. It’s a small touch, but it grounds the film’s wilder flights of fancy in something real and a little bittersweet.

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The supporting cast includes Cooper Tomlinson, Megan Lawless as the girl next door who clearly has feelings for Bear that he’s too distracted to notice, and Andy Richter in a reportedly underused role as the music store owner. The Rotten Tomatoes score has been climbing steadily alongside the film’s word-of-mouth, with box office projections growing as the opening weekend arrives.

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Critics are landing mostly in B to B+ territory — appreciating the craft, the performance, and the sharp social instincts while acknowledging the film’s rough edges. \”A simple story told well is the oldest trick in the book,\” the Boston Herald noted, \”especially when it works this well.\”

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The Obsession that Bear wished for turned out to be nothing like he imagined. The film named after it, though, is exactly what horror fans have been waiting for — a sharp, sick, surprisingly emotional genre movie with a performance at its center that demands to be seen. Navarrette has been working steadily for years. After this weekend, the industry is going to start paying very different attention.

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Obsession is rated R and is in theaters now.

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“category”: “Movies

The post ‘Obsession’ Review: Inde Navarrette Makes Her Mark appeared first on Cream.

• A24’s Backrooms hits theaters May 29, 2026, directed by internet horror sensation Kane Parsons
• The film stars Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve as two people trapped in the eerie, labyrinthine backrooms
• Based on a viral creepypasta that exploded in meme culture starting in 2019
• Early critic reactions after an exclusive press screening are overwhelmingly ecstatic
• The film carries an estimated $10 million budget and is A24’s summer horror tentpole

Horror has a new obsession, and it lives in the fluorescent-lit, yellow-wallpapered void of the backrooms. A24’s upcoming film Backrooms — opening May 29, 2026 — just had its first press screening, and critics are already losing their minds over it in the best possible way.

The early reactions flooding X paint a picture of something genuinely unsettling and surprisingly artful. Joshua Rothkopf of the Los Angeles Times called it “horror stripped to its essentials: a hallway, a door, knowing that you will go through it. Conceptually, it’s a triumph, a nightmare with its own weather.” He also singled out the film’s young director for particular praise, saying Kane Parsons knows exactly how to chill his audience.

Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic Courtney Howard, who has written for both Variety and the AV Club, was equally floored. “A brilliant, frightening vision. Beautifully claustrophobic, pulse-pounding & freaky AF,” she wrote on X, adding that the scares are top-notch and that both lead actors deliver. “Renate Reinsve & Chiwetel Ejiofor are terrific,” Howard said.

So far, it’s been all raves. No mixed takes, no hedging — just critics apparently sitting in the dark, genuinely rattled.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=owH_yrzbNns%3Fv%3DowH_yrzbNns

From Internet Creepypasta to A24 Horror Tentpole

If you’re not chronically online, here’s the backstory: the backrooms concept is a creepypasta — an internet urban legend — that started circulating in 2019. The premise is deceptively simple and deeply unsettling: imagine “noclipping” out of reality and finding yourself alone in an endless maze of empty, liminal rooms. Beige carpet. Fluorescent hum. No exits. No people. Just the creeping certainty that something is wrong.

The concept went massively viral, but it was Kane Parsons — posting as Kane Pixels on YouTube — who turned it into something genuinely cinematic. His found-footage-style short films gave the backrooms a visual language and a mythology, racking up millions of views and catching the attention of A24 in the process. Now, still a remarkably young filmmaker, Parsons is making his feature debut with a reported $10 million budget and one of the most talked-about horror casts of the year.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=mDjVPiwl3Zc%3Fv%3DmDjVPiwl3Zc

What the Movie Is Actually About

The feature-length story centers on two people pulled into the backrooms against their will. Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is a furniture store owner who simply vanishes one day — there one moment, gone the next. His therapist, Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve), comes to the store looking for him after he disappears. She doesn’t find Clark. Instead, she finds herself just as lost as he is, trapped in the same disorienting, seemingly infinite maze of disused rooms, desperately searching for a way out and a way back to reality.

It’s a smart narrative frame — two people from the same life, stranded in the same nightmare, hunting for each other without knowing if they’re getting closer or further apart. And with Ejiofor and Reinsve as your leads, you’ve got the kind of grounded, emotionally intelligent performances that can make abstract horror genuinely devastating rather than just visually interesting.

A24 is positioning Backrooms as its summer horror event, and given the early critical response, that bet is looking very good right now. May 29 can’t come soon enough.

The post A24’s Backrooms Movie Has Critics Floored appeared first on Cream.