Horrorâs Hollywood takeover is an exciting moment â but wonât someone think of the squeamish?
In this weekâs newsletter: The unprecedented success of Backrooms and Obsession has made stars of their creators. For the good of cinema, however, theyâd do
In this weekâs newsletter: The unprecedented success of Backrooms and Obsession has made stars of their creators. For the good of cinema, however, theyâd do well to look beyond the genre going forward ⢠Donât get The Guide delivered to your inbox? Sign up here Did you go to the cinema this week? If you did, that rumbling you felt wasnât down to those spicy nachos you ate.
Well, it might have been â but equally, you may just have been experiencing the tectonic shift suddenly under way in Hollywood. This was the week that two twentysomething YouTubers took over the box office with their horror films, upending all the industry rules and preconceptions in the process. At the top of the tree sits Kane Parsons, a 20-year-old phenom whose debut film, Backrooms an A24 psychological chiller based on his own webseries, and inspired by a âcreepypastaâ horror story shared across the internet â has grossed a scarcely fathomable $140m worldwide in its first week.
Just beneath Parsons, though a shade older at 26, is Curry Baker, a YouTube comic whose supernatural horror movie, Obsession, has enjoyed an almost unheard of week-on-week-on-week rise in ticket sales, and is on course to be one of the most profitable films of all time, having been made for a tiddly $750,000. That the pair have nudged Star Wars spin-off The Mandalorian and Grogu â a far more expensive movie that was expected to squat atop the box office for much of May and June â into third place only underscores what an unlikely cinematic revolution this is.
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