Three of the most talked about films at the moment—Obsession, Backrooms, and The Amazing Digital Circus: The Last Act—couldn’t be more different at first glance. Obsession is about a guy who unintentionally bewitches the girl he’s secretly in love with, making her love him back at the cost of turning her into a completely different person. Backrooms follows a furniture salesman who discovers a seemingly unending labyrinth of strange rooms behind a secret portal inside his store. Digital Circus is the theatrically released finale of an animated TV series about a group of people stuck inside a virtual world controlled by an artificial intelligence programmed to generate wacky adventures.
Despite their differences, these films also have a lot in common. All three can be categorized as high-concept psychological horror. They have seen huge financial success compared to their modest budgets, are based on or connected to preexisting media properties that originated on the internet, and were written and directed by Gen Z filmmakers. The youngest of these—Backrooms’ Kane Parsons—is just 21 years old. The films also give voice to anxieties specific to or prevalent among this troubled generation, which is rapidly turning into an important political force around the world. Supposing the films are mouthpieces, what do they tell us?
