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Horror Used to Run on Freddy and Pennywise. This Year’s Breakout Hits Scare People with an Endless Room and a Wish

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A still from A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

Two of this summer’s breakout horror films broke the mold audiences grew up with. Backrooms, an endless interior starring Chiwetel Ejiofor as a showroom owner, opened May 29. Obsession, in which Michael Johnston’s Bear wishes that Inde Navarrette’s Nikki would love him more than anyone, opened May 15.

Both did real numbers. Made on a $10 million budget, Backrooms opened to $81.4 million domestically and has since pulled in $400.1 million worldwide. Obsession’s cited worldwide gross is $523 million.

Zoomers see Freddy and Pennywise as quaint as millennials see werewolves and vampires, since what really scares people now is simulacrum and alienation.

With about two-thirds of its opening audience over 25, the 2017 It has grossed $719.8 million, and Freddy, again voiced by Robert Englund, joined Fortnite on October 1, 2026.

Critics who covered the Gen-Z horror wave landed elsewhere too. Vulture grouped Obsession, Backrooms, and It Ends as a trifecta whose shared fear is that a change lasts forever. Defector called the Backrooms maze “a bizarre simulacrum of the real world” and said Obsession plays “crazy girlfriend” clichés.

The “crazy girlfriend” type was on her mind, Navarrette told Vulture, and she played Nikki as the victim.

A May 2019 4chan post about endless rooms is where Backrooms itself started, and its photograph is a 2003 renovation shot taken at a hobby shop in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

Freddy Krueger's scarred face and bladed glove raised against a blue background, from A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984).
Freddy Krueger’s burned face and blade-tipped glove loom against a blue-lit background in a scene from A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984).
Pennywise the clown peering up from a storm drain, red nose and white face paint, while a child in a yellow raincoat stands nearby.
Pennywise the clown grins from the darkness of a storm drain at a child in a yellow raincoat in a scene from Stephen King’s It (1990).
A bearded man looking up through a small opening into a large, empty yellow-beige room with fluorescent ceiling lights and a lone chair in the background.
A man peers up through a low opening into a vast, fluorescent-lit beige room containing only a toppled chair and scattered objects, in a still from Backrooms. Credit: A24.
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Meet the author

January Nelson is a writer, editor, and dreamer. She writes about astrology, games, love, relationships, and entertainment. Her favorite horror movies tend to be more on the artsy side.

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