With “Backrooms” and “Obsession,” Hollywood Is Having a Zoomer-Horror Renaissance.

After stumbling upon the Backrooms that first night, Clark returns to them again and again, like a man obsessed. He becomes bent on mapping them out and uncovering their secrets, and Ejiofor lends him a fanatic’s wide-eyed conviction, as if this great mystery might give his life new meaning. In an underdeveloped twist, Clark persuades his skeptical assistant, Kat (Lukita Maxwell), and her more gullible boyfriend, Bobby (Finn Bennett), to enter the Backrooms with him, armed with Bobby’s camcorder. It’s here that “Backrooms” briefly becomes a found-footage movie, and one that notably takes place before found-footage movies were a thing. (When Bobby descends to a much darker, scarier lower level of the Backrooms, you’re reminded of the shaky-cam suspense of “The Blair Witch Project,” which, in 1990, is still almost a decade away.) It soon becomes clear that something large, hulking, and dangerous is stalking them through the maze—and, eventually, it will bear down on Mary, who also gets sucked into the Backrooms and even supplants Clark as the story’s protagonist.

If a more readily watchable screen actor than Reinsve has emerged in recent years, they aren’t coming to mind. In a drama, she can hold you rapt with a hushed line reading; here, she also gets your pulse racing, whether she’s dodging an assailant or racing up a staircase suspended over a seemingly bottomless chasm. We cling to Mary even when the script saddles her with flashbacks to a formatively miserable childhood, or when we hear drearily revealing excerpts from a self-help book she’s written: “We all have our loops, our habits, behaviors that keep us walking in circles.” We scarcely need such subtextual nudging to grasp that the Backrooms are, like the circular maze of “Exit 8,” a metaphor for a life of fearful, self-protective routine. They are also, it seems, a storehouse of the subconscious, filled with the demons and detritus of old memories, some of which—a woman with many shard-like faces, an overgrown, sentient pirate statue—appear distorted to the point of abstraction.

The eerie conceptual power of the Backrooms hinges on these ideas and associations remaining just beneath the surface; it’s the unyielding opacity of the environment that sustains its mystery. The film is at its best early on, as Clark wanders through a physical environment that, to his mind and ours, has no obvious origin and no clear reason to exist. Ironically, it’s when the script begins to roll out the explanations that the entire edifice threatens to collapse. The deeper we plunge, and the more we get to know the phantasms of Clark’s anguished psyche, the more “Backrooms” seems to shrink, conceptually, into a hard, unsatisfying nubbin of a movie—less an exploration of a strange world than a tidy evisceration of male toxicity. The movie’s closing scenes smack, dispiritingly, of franchise consolidation: a scientist type (Mark Duplass) who has been monitoring the proceedings from afar suddenly takes center frame, tying the events of the film into the web series’ larger mythology. Parsons is an undeniable talent, with a potent gift for atmosphere, but a sharper resolution to “Backrooms” might have increased my excitement at the promise of more to come.

As of this writing, “Backrooms,” buoyed by strong word of mouth and a shrewd marketing campaign by its distributor, A24, is projected to earn an astonishing seventy million dollars in its opening weekend. Remarkably, it isn’t the first time this month that a horror-themed big-screen début from an enviably young YouTuber has surpassed box-office expectations. Or crushed them, in the case of “Obsession,” the shoestring-budgeted first feature from the twenty-six-year-old director and writer Curry Barker, who got his start directing horror and comedy shorts and posting them online. “Obsession,” which was acquired by Focus Features after premièring at the Toronto International Film Festival, opened in theatres on May 15th, and has since grossed more than a hundred million dollars worldwide—well over one hundred times its production costs. Might a generation raised on social media, a force often credited with hastening the death of theatrical moviegoing, instead prove to be its salvation?