It is a strange time when one of the, if not the most, popular film series of all time, Star Wars, generates such lackluster interest that a pair of low-budget, non-Intellectual Property driven horror films perform better than the most recent entry in the long-loved franchise.
As with most things in life I believe that there is no simple single answer to as to why Obsessionand Backrooms pulled into such audience number while The Mandalorian and Grogu suffered middling success.
Certainly, the fact that three years passed between the last season of the once hit show, The Mandalorian and the release of the feature film it inspired dulled general interest. It today’s fast moving short attention span driven culture to paraphrase an extra in Jaws, ‘Three years is like three decades!’ It is also not helpful that the third season of that show proved to be the most lackluster one offered, splitting up the dynamic pairing that had driven viewer interest and delving into ‘lore’ of the Star Wars universe that interested the most die-hard fans but for everyone else came off as impenetrable and uninteresting.
When the trailers for The Mandalorian and Grogu finally appeared, promising the return of that pairing they seemed to rely entirely on the affection people once had for the pairing, offering nothing of the plot or story. The studio’s only pitched seemed to be, here are the characters you loved, come see them, and nothing more. In a time of already declining theater attendance, shortening windows between theatrical release and streaming availability, offering up nothing more than television characters on a theatrical screen is not enough to coax people out of their homes for an expensive trip to the local multiplex. The ones who did go reported that the film had no real story to it, it was a very expensive collection of action scenes and references to other programs that the creators of already shown on television. the script was so flabby and pointless that the first 15 or 20 minutes of the film could be edited out and absolutely nothing would change.
The tired and reheated offering from a franchise nearly 50 years old cannot explain why a pair of horror films exploded with financial and cultural success.
The horror movie genre mirrored the Star Wars franchise in the manner that 2026 with yet another entry in a horror series that had grown quite long in the tooth with the release of Scream 7 the latest addition in that 30-years-old franchise. Now, my opinion on this may be somewhat prejudiced as I have never loved or even enjoyed the original Scream when so many people found the movie so perfectly suited to their tastes. That said I find it hard to imagine how a script can breathe new life into a slasher that has continued for seven feature films without becoming a parody of itself. I will confess that ‘slashers’ are my least favorite sub-genre of horror with very, very few holding my interest. While other people adored Ti West’s X, I could only groan as the characters throughout the movie runtime veered further and further from anything I could believe as genuine human action and reaction. What Obsession and Backrooms offered were fresh interesting horror stories that were either a series of ‘kills’ displaying technical expertise in the effects nor yet another exploration of grief using horror as a metaphor. Instead, each film spoke to a relevant cultural moment that resonated with people, particularly younger adults, and not the grey-haired fans of quite old franchises.
Obsession speaks to entitlement and consent with Nikki being stripped of agency over her body and her mind being the real horror of the tale. This is a subject that is very real to nearly all, if not all, women today. Between rights being stripped away by their government and the need to exercise vigilance over ever drink in public it is hardly surprising that film like Obsession strikes such a powerful emotional chord. Some have suggested the film would be more powerful if it presented the story from Nikki’s point of view however I think that is a challenge that would be nearly insurmountable in a cinematic form. A character without the ability to influence the events around her or even her own actions is one that would not thrive in a visual medium, that would work in prose, I can see a terrific novel with that approach but not a movie. I found the true horror of Obsession to be NIkki’s enslavement and not her outbursts of violent possessiveness. This movie is very much one of its time as is Backrooms.
Backrooms, inspired and adapted from the directors short projects on YouTube is a movie that, while set in the dreary 1990s, speaks to the young adult suffering the early 21st century. In addition to coming from a medium with which they are very familiar, the internet, its visual presentation, an empty, haunted, and ultimately incomprehensible world. Strip malls were not dead and empty spaces in the 90s but they are today and the vast lonely volumes present in Backrooms is an apt metaphor for the lives of young adults today, a cohort of people who suffered the pandemic for their teenage years, and emerged from college burden with debt and few if any prospect to have even the same lives much less better ones of their parents. A seemingly endless world that lacks maps or any other method of navigating is the world that they are attempting to build lives in. Is it any surprise that this is also a horror that touches their souls?
Star Wars emerged in the late 70s, a time of deep cynicism when heroes were often depicted as doomed their values a futile expression. Lucas painted a simpler time with simpler morality, one where it was easy to know right from wrong, that life had a light side and dark side and that resonated with the next several generations but this generation cannot believe in such a world. They have suffered too much to adopt a pollyannish view of reality; the dark, haunted, and manipulative horrors of Backrooms and Obsession mirrors the world that they know far more than a bounty hunter bound by some honorable code.
