This Week in Horror: Obsession Makes History, Leslie Vernon Is Back, and The Backrooms Arrives

Horror fans, I need you to sit down. Get a snack. Maybe a blanket.

Because whoever is in charge of scheduling horror news this week apparently looked at the calendar, saw “last Friday of May,” and said, you know what, let’s just break everyone simultaneously. We got a major theatrical release, a cult sequel that fans have been begging for since 2006, a legitimately history-making box office story, AND the most talked-about trailer to drop out of Cannes. In one week. All of it. In one week.

I have been covering horror for a long time, and this might genuinely be one of the most stacked news weeks I can remember. So let’s get into it.

The Backrooms Is In Theaters Right Now and You Should Go

Today is May 29, and The Backrooms is officially in theaters through A24. Which is a sentence that still feels slightly unreal to type.

Here is the origin story, because it matters. Kane Parsons, a kid from California, started uploading Backrooms videos to YouTube under the name Kane Pixels. Found footage. Liminal spaces. That specific flavor of dread that comes from a yellow-carpeted, fluorescent-lit nowhere that somehow feels deeply wrong. His videos went massively viral, horror fans lost their minds over them, and A24 came knocking. Kane Parsons is 20 years old. He is now A24’s youngest feature director. Just let that sink in for a moment.

The film stars Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve, with Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, Lukita Maxwell, Avan Jogia, and Robert Bobroczkyi rounding out the cast. It’s produced by James Wan, Shawn Levy, and Osgood Perkins, which is a producer lineup that reads like someone just rifled through the horror section of a wish list. The logline follows a therapist whose patient vanishes into a dimension beyond reality, forcing her to go in after him.

What makes this release unusual isn’t just the origin story, it’s what it signals. Internet horror has lived on YouTube and Reddit and creepypasta forums for years, building devoted audiences through found footage and ambient dread and community-driven mythology. The Backrooms being here, in theaters, with an A24 stamp and a serious cast, is a genuine cultural moment for that entire corner of horror fandom. If you’ve ever lost an hour to Kane Pixels’ channel, you understand why today feels like a big deal.

Go see it. Then tell everyone.

Leslie Vernon Is Coming Back and Horror Twitter Is Not Okay (In the Best Way)

Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon came out in 2006. It was a low-budget mockumentary about a documentary crew following an aspiring slasher villain as he prepares for his “big night,” and it was one of the smartest, funniest, most genuinely clever horror comedies of the 2000s. It developed a cult following that never really went away. And for twenty years, fans have been asking the same question. Where is the sequel?

Behind the Mask II: The Return of Leslie Vernon is officially announced.

Director Scott Glosserman and writer David J. Stieve are both returning. Nathan Baesel is coming back as Leslie Vernon. Angela Goethals returns as Taylor Gentry. And Robert Englund is back as Doc Halloran. The whole gang. Paper Street Pictures, run by Aaron B. Koontz and Cameron Burns, is producing.

The target is 2027, and the filmmakers are launching a Kickstarter campaign so fans can get directly involved in making the movie bigger. Glosserman has said that the sequel is happening either way, but the Kickstarter opens up possibilities for scale.

I cannot overstate how much this announcement meant to a very specific kind of horror fan this week. Leslie Vernon is one of those movies that people discover and immediately have to force it on everyone they know. The fact that it’s been two decades and the reaction to this announcement is still this electric tells you everything you need to know about what the original film means to people.

Twenty years is a long time to wait. Based on the response this week, nobody has lost interest.

Obsession Is Doing Things at the Box Office That Are Not Supposed to Happen

You need to understand what Obsession is doing, because it’s genuinely not normal.

The film is written and directed by Curry Barker, who got his start on YouTube. It stars Michael Johnston as Bear, a music store employee who buys a supernatural toy that grants him a wish for his childhood friend Nikki (Inde Navarrette) to fall in love with him, with predictably horrifying consequences. The budget was $750,000.

It opened on May 15. Debut weekend: $17.2 million. Solid. Good. Indie horror success story.

Then the second weekend happened. $22.4 million. Up 30% from opening weekend.

For context, that kind of growth in week two, at that scale, playing in more than 2,500 theaters, is something that essentially does not happen. Blumhouse founder Jason Blum called it the only wide-release horror film on record to grow its second weekend at this scale. The film has now crossed $90 million worldwide. For a $750,000 movie. That’s nearly 120 times its budget. It also broke a 17-year box office record, becoming the cheapest movie to produce to hold the number one spot, the first film of its kind since Paranormal Activity back in 2009.

The film is at 94% on Rotten Tomatoes and earned an A- on CinemaScore. Audiences are not just showing up, they’re bringing people back with them.

What does this mean going forward? It means studios are watching. It means the argument for mid-budget original horror just got a lot louder. It means a YouTube director just pulled off one of the most surprising theatrical runs in recent memory. We will be talking about Obsession as a case study for years.

Jane Schoenbrun Dropped the Trailer for Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma and the Internet Has Not Recovered

Okay. The title alone. TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA. I want to shake the hand of whoever signed off on that. I want to send them a fruit basket.

Jane Schoenbrun, the director behind We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and I Saw the TV Glow, has a new film. It premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival to universal critical acclaim and won the Queer Palm. MUBI dropped the full trailer this week. And horror Twitter, horror Reddit, horror Discord, every corner of the horror internet where people actually care about cinema as a thing, basically stopped functioning for 24 hours.

Here is the setup, Hannah Einbinder plays Kris, a young filmmaker hired to reboot a long-running slasher franchise. In the process of making her movie, she tracks down the original final girl of the series, played by Gillian Anderson. What starts as a creative collaboration becomes something much more, an emotional obsession, a blurring of reality and fiction, set against the backdrop of an abandoned summer camp where the line between the film-within-the-film and actual horror keeps dissolving.

It’s a queer meta-slasher. It’s a film-industry satire. It’s a love story that is also maybe a horror story. It’s Jane Schoenbrun doing what Jane Schoenbrun does, which is take genre and use it to get at something raw and true about identity and desire and what it means to finally understand yourself.

The cast alone should have you on the floor. Hannah Einbinder is perfect casting. Gillian Anderson as a reclusive, legendary final girl feels like someone reached directly into the collective horror fan brain and pulled out the dream.

The film opens theatrically through MUBI on August 7, with a summer tour hitting New York, Massachusetts, Montreal, and Oregon before wide release. If you are anywhere near one of those cities, you already know what you’re doing this summer.

Schoenbrun said at Cannes that the film is about “coming into one’s own body, one’s own identity, one’s own sexuality” and that it deals with “stuff that most people figure out about themselves when they’re 15 or 16, because I didn’t get a first puberty that made sense.”

That’s the movie. That’s what this is. Mark your calendars for August 7.

Quick Hits

Scary Movie is back and opening June 5. Marlon Wayans, Shawn Wayans, Anna Faris, and Regina Hall are all returning for a new entry directed by Michael Tiddes. Also joining: Damon Wayans Jr., Kim Wayans, Heidi Gardner, and more. Marlon is calling it a “rebooquel.” Make of that what you will. It’s through Paramount Pictures and opens next Friday.

Hokum arrived this month from the director of Caveat and Oddity. Damian McCarthy, who built a cult following with two of the more unsettling Irish horror films of the last few years, has a new one coming. If you have not seen Caveat, go immediately. If you have, you know exactly why Hokum is on the radar.

Nicolas Winding Refn is making Maniac Cop as a feature with MUBI financing. Originally announced in other forms over the years, the project is now moving forward as a theatrical film. Refn doing Maniac Cop through MUBI is the kind of sentence that makes horror fans do a double take and then immediately set a calendar reminder.

A Quick Personal Note

I want to step outside the roundup for just a second, because I have something I’ve been meaning to tell you.

After years of writing for horror sites, contributing to various corners of the internet, and posting takes into the void of social media, I finally built a space that is entirely mine. I launched a Substack, and I started a Facebook page, and both of them are places where I plan to do the kind of writing I’ve always wanted to do but never quite had the right home for.

On the Substack you’ll find horror recommendations, personal essays, streaming discoveries, things that don’t fit neatly, half-formed thoughts about why certain movies wreck me, and occasionally just me working through why I love this genre as much as I do. The Facebook page is where I’ll share updates, start conversations, and generally be a person who exists outside of publication slots.

This corner of horror writing has always felt like the most honest version of what I do, and I wanted a place where I could push that further. If you’ve ever read something I wrote and felt like it was speaking directly to you, that’s the energy I’m bringing to both spaces.

If you enjoy what I do here, come find me there too. I’d genuinely love to have you.

Now go see The Backrooms.