We, for One, Welcome Our New Horror Overlords
We, for One, Welcome Our New Horror Overlords
Has fear finally taken over the entertainment industry?
Backrooms, the new indie horror film, just became the fastest-ever movie in the genre to gross $100 million dollars, crossing that key threshold in just six days. For the general public, the film feels like a brand-new idea, with buzzwords like “liminal spaces” and “creepypasta” bouncing around in their heads for the very first time. But just as the movie’s star discovers a whole world of weirdness behind the walls of his furniture store, anyone who starts googling the world of Backrooms will find a nearly endless history of crowd-sourced lore and related videos. There’s also more than 1,000 Backrooms videogames out there, with one of the latest being a project by indie horror legend Puppet Combo.
The film also helped bumped The Mandalorian and Grogu off the box office top five after the latest Star Wars film had spent less than a month in theaters. Going into the most recent weekend, the current top-five list consists of horror-spoof Scary Movie [2026] at the top, followed by the newly released He-Man movie, the aforementioned Backrooms, the romantic-horror sensation Obsession (one of the first movies in years to do better on its second weekend than its first), and The Amazing Digital Circus: The Last Act, the purported final episode of the animated YouTube horror-comedy series.
What’s going on here? How are the kind of low-budget and decidedly surreal horror shorts and skits that had once been relegated to film festivals or the dark corners of the internet transforming into feature films that do as well (if not better) than massive franchise films? Well, it didn’t happen overnight. Last year, both Weapons and Sinners—two gory, intelligently unsettling films—made between $270-370 million apiece before going on to achieve general mainstream acceptance… not to mention Oscar wins. Both arrived on the back of 2024’s Oscar-winning body horror masterpiece The Substance. And it goes further back still: The normalization of modern horror could be traced back to 2017’s Get Out, which was nominated for four Academy Awards in total.
It’s not just a movie thing. Horror has become huge everywhere. Since 2016, Stranger Things, Squid Game, and Wednesday have cemented themselves as some of the biggest streaming shows of all time, scoring multiple spin-offs and, in some cases, their own cereal boxes. In young adult literature, the “Dungeons & Dragons meets Alien Apocalypse” series Dungeon Crawler Carl series is well on its way to becoming the next big thing, with millions of copies sold and a TV adaptation already in the works.
Most importantly, we have videogames, which are more horror-friendly than ever. The year isn’t even halfway over, yet two of the biggest contenders for GOTY 2026 are already Resident Evil: Requiem, the ninth mainline game in the survival-horror franchise, and Mina the Hollower, an indie horror-adventure from the creators of Shovel Knight. Both games sold faster than their direct predecessors, becoming critical and commercial darlings overnight.
And that’s just over the past few months. For years now, horror mods in Roblox and Minecraft have continued to build momentum as the most popular content among kids in the 12-18 age range. Among Us, the massively popular game that takes cues from both Alien and The Thing, just got a new cartoon show that’s a ratings hit. And let’s not even talk about the whole Skibidi Toilet craze of 2024, which only recently seems to have finally been flushed out of our lives and down the pipe, along with the offputting 6-7 phenomenon).
Why is it that horror just keeps getting more and more popular as time goes on? As with the slime craze of the 1980’s, it seemingly speaks to the brimming soup of unresolved cultural anxieties, swirling together with the populace’s constant hunger for novelty, churning together into a chaotic slurry that can only be contained by something awful. In 2026, the depths of our anxieties, and simultaneous desire to be wowed by new things, are too deep and wide for any regular river of green sludge to fill. A generation that’s grown up under the shadow of 9/11 and the constant threat of school shootings, not to mention living with a fear of saying, doing, or seeing the wrong thing online for millions to see, has naturally developed a high tolerance for fear. Movies like Backrooms and Obsession, as well as games like Mina and Requiem, where the world is broken and no one or nothing is as safe as it may seem, meet them exactly where they’re at.
There’s also the fact that horror is arguably the most versatile of genres. Not only is surprise hard-baked into its storytelling methods, but horror works best when you find drama, action, and comedy women into its fabric. In particular, much has been said about how horror also uses the same “set up/punchline” structure as comedy. It’s just that with horror, the setup usually involves making you believe that your main character would be willing to risk going into the spooky house or otherwise getting involved with a real bad time, while the punchline involves watching something trying to literally punch holes or cut lines in them.
That’s not to say that AAA budgets and established intellectual properties are in danger of being bumped off by low-budget horror movies, at least for now. The new Spider-Man, Avengers, and Grand Theft Auto releases of 2026 are sure to bring in the most dollars of any entertainment launches this year. But they also cost the most to make—in GTA6’s case, rumors abound of a billion-dollar budget or greater. With that kind of money, you could make dozens of Resident Evil: Requiems, or hundreds of Mina the Hollowers. Sure, not all of them would be hits, but knowing that all that capital could be used to back the visions of hundreds of creators, each with their own unique ways of expression the dread, certainly seems like a better use of resources than seeing all that cash funneled into one or two big tentpoles a year.