Big Screen Scares: OBSESSION and BACKROOMS

The YouTubers have arrived. We’ve occasionally had filmmakers emerge from amateur efforts on that site, for better (the Filipou brothers’ scary Talk to Me and Bring Her Back are massive leaps beyond their channel’s horror shorts) and or worse (Chris Stuckmann’s Shelby Oaks is a dull, cliched, irritating horror film). Now 2026 seems to be doing its best to say there’s perhaps more promise to be plucked from those ranks of creators, like television and music videos and theater before it. Funny that so far they’re all horror, which has often been a calling card for new indie voices. It’s been mere months since play-through poster Markiplier’s independent adaptation of the video game Iron Lung turned a big profit in theaters. I found the movie a bit repetitive and disorienting, but was quite impressed by how it was effective on its own terms. He played to his strengths making a one-location movie in which he essentially sits at the controls and plays the game. Now we have two more YouTuber film debuts: Curry Barker’s Obsession and Kane Parsons’s Backrooms. Judging them on formal control and narrative ambition, it’s clear that they could be two big new talents. 

Barker’s Obsession has a simple premise: what if there was a magic wand that gave you one wish? He has this device fall into the hands of a young man (Michael Johnston) who has a crush on a girl (Inde Navarrette). He can’t quite bring himself to admit it to her, even though she’s given him multiple opportunities. Maybe he’s shy. Maybe he’s self-conscious. Maybe he’s stressed. Maybe he’s afraid of rejection. Maybe it’s a toxic stew of all of these things. He can’t be honest with himself; how could he be honest with another? He doesn’t entirely believe the magic wand—a One Wish Willow he finds by happenstance in a witchy novelty shop. But that doesn’t stop him from using it to wish the girl would “love him more than anything in the world.” Anyone whose ever read, or even heard of, “The Monkey’s Paw” can guess where this is going. She becomes demonically obsessed with him with occasionally unpredictable results (like duct taping his front door shut from the inside while he sleeps). And, dud that he is, he likes her obsessiveness. Mostly. For a while. (The tape thing gives him slight pause). 

Barker gives the movie a great creepy crawling pace and lets the two lead performances wiggle around in the premise’s discomforts. He shoots in a boxy aspect ratio and glides the camera with an eerie otherworldliness as the actors play out the inevitable tragedy. Navarrette in particular does well signaling otherworldly devotion and dissociative trauma in the same wide-eyed glances. It’s clear that the movie is aware the young man is the villain, and the girl is trapped in his wishful delusion. She’s not really in love with him, and there are weird supernatural cracks in the intensity of her clinginess. Eventually it erupts in horror gore—but the sense of surprise is pretty much gone. The shallowness of its insights catch up to it. I’m sure it’ll be a great, provocative watch for people who’ve never had thoughts about male entitlement, unhealthy relationships, or wishes-gone-wrong before. For the rest of us, it’ll be admiring the filmmaker’s chops while wishing the script had a little more meat on the bone. 

Parson’s Backrooms is an even more impressive feat. As a work of sustained mood and space it’s incredible. He builds one of those great movie places and gets a little lost in it. But who can begrudge that? I was completely enveloped by its sense of a porous boundary between the reality and surreality of its premise. To be on its wavelength practically demands leaning in to try to see around the next corner as the camera slowly turns. Based on a series of YouTube shorts he made in his teenage years—Parsons is still only 20!—it concerns those eerie liminal spaces that were all the rage in meme horror some years back. Have you ever been alone in an empty office building or a back hallway in a mall that’s been almost, but not entirely, cleared of furniture? Now imagine a maze of those rooms, inconsistently lit, with distant muffled footsteps, and an increasingly surreal sense of architecture. Halls go nowhere, doors open onto stairs, stairs lead to doors, doors lead to ramps, ramps lead to rooms that narrow to another door. You get the picture. All of it is set to ominous low rumbles and the buzz of florescent lights. It is unsettling, but pulled forward by an inquisitive momentum. What is this place? I was uneasy, but also didn't want to leave.

That’s the same sensation, and compulsion, for the lead character, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor. He’s the owner of a struggling discount furniture store who discovers, late one night, that he can step through a wall in the basement and end up in this befuddling place. And then he just has to know more. The movie’s at its best as it follows these excursions, sometimes in creepy clean digital photography, sometimes in fuzzy Blair Witch-style VHS found footage aesthetics. (It’s set in a strangely convincing 1990—15 years before the director’s birth, another unsettling realization.) I honestly could’ve watched Ejiofor and his two employees, camcorder in tow, explore this space for the entire runtime. The camera creeps along with them, sending shivers with each half-glimpsed shadow in the darkness just beyond our perspective. But the movie moves perhaps too quickly to broaden the scope and jumps to some big character shifts when the mystery of the moment was enough. There’s also a therapist (Renate Reinsve) who worries that her client has lost it in delusions describing the backrooms, and has odd flashbacks implying her own traumatic backstory. She goes looking for him. Then there’s a guy in a white lab coat (Mark Duplass) who seems like he’s going to explain things, but mercifully doesn’t know much more than we do by that point. To Parson’s credit, there is no answer, but that does leave the movie saying only: Huh, look at this place. Weird, right? But, hey, this is a weird place worth seeing!