Two Kinds of Obsession

Obsession earns its grip. Backrooms borrows it from four years of internet lore. One of them works on you. The other only works on the people who were already inside.

Two horror films are in the air right now. Both were made by first-time directors. Both, as it happens, are about obsession. One is the best thing I have seen in a theatre this year. The other is the biggest opening in A24’s history. They are not the same film, and the distance between them is worth more than either one alone.

Obsession

Curry Barker’s debut runs on a premise so old it is almost a dare. A man wants a woman to love him, finds a cursed object that grants the wish, and gets exactly what he asked for. Bear is hopeless for his coworker Nikki and never manages to say it, so he buys a novelty toy from a witchy little gift shop, a One Wish Willow, and wishes she loved him more than anything in the world. She does. Within seconds she is at his side, rapt and fixated and wrong.

What Barker does with that setup is the reason to go. The story is built brilliantly. It keeps resetting your sense of who is the predator and who is the prey, so the ground never settles under you, and the structure refuses to move the way these films usually move. The performances carry a strange new charge. Inde Navarrette plays the granted wish as something closer to possession than romance, and the way the acting is pitched, all surface warmth laid over something hollow, is the most unsettling thing in it. The film is darkly funny right up until it is not funny at all. It is eerie in the way that lasts, the kind that sits behind your sternum for a day afterward. No franchise, no lore, no homework required. It earns every inch of its hold on you from the screen in front of you.

Backrooms

Backrooms is the opposite kind of object. Kane Parsons made it at twenty, off the back of four years spent building the Backrooms mythology in public, the liminal-space horror that began as one unsettling video and grew into an entire internet canon. A24 put its full weight behind the film, and it worked. Roughly $118 million worldwide, the studio’s biggest opening ever, the youngest director to top the box office. Parsons has said he framed the film as a companion piece to the lore.

That is the whole problem. If you spent the last four years inside the Backrooms, the wiki and the videos and the dread of the endless office floor, the film hands you a key to a door you already love. If you did not, it hands you a key to an empty room. I did not, and I was bored. Worse than bored: I could not work out why anyone calls it horror. It has a mood, a budget, and a famous cast, and almost nothing underneath that earns the genre. The fear it runs on is fear you were expected to bring with you.

What the pair makes visible

You only see this clearly by holding them side by side. Both films want the same thing, to get inside you and stay there, and they go about it in opposite ways. Obsession builds the artifact so well it needs no context. Backrooms builds the context so deep the artifact barely has to turn up.

The uncomfortable part is that borrowed attention wins the scoreboard. Obsession is a critical darling most people will catch on a streaming service eight months from now. Backrooms is the biggest opening in A24’s history. Those four years of free lore were not a marketing afterthought. They were the moat, and the moat converted a devoted in-group into a record weekend. It is the most durable growth strategy there is: build the canon before you ship the product, and the product sells itself to the people who helped build it.

A moat that only holds the in-group is also a wall around it. Borrowed attention does not travel. It converts the believers and leaves everyone else standing in the empty room, checking a phone, wondering why this is supposed to be frightening. The bill for coasting on lore comes due with exactly the people the lore never reached, and there are always more of them than there are believers. Obsession will be found, slowly, by anyone who likes being scared, because the thing itself is the draw. Backrooms will be re-watched, fervently, by the people who were already home.

If you are choosing one, choose Obsession, and it is not close. It is far better, and better in the way that holds: it asks you to have done nothing first. If you are building anything, a film, a product, a publication, the pair is the lesson. Lore is the finest moat money cannot buy and the worst crutch you can lean on. Build the canon if you can. Make sure that when the believers bring their friends, there is something in the room.