Why Modern Horror Is Obsessed With Obsolete Tech
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- Obsession and Backrooms opened summer 2025 each grossing hundreds of millions of dollars on comparatively minuscule budgets, both directed by gen Z filmmakers Curry Barker and Kane Parsons who first rose to prominence on YouTube.
- Both films deploy a steady stream of analogue props and production design — Obsession's mom-and-pop music store, vintage station wagon, and kitschy gag gift; Backrooms' self-help cassette tapes, smacked TV with fuzzy signal, and wall-to-wall carpeted office-park interiors.
- Jane Schoenbrun's Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma follows Kris (Hannah Einbinder) trying to reboot an 80s slasher franchise and recruit faded original starlet Billy (Gillian Anderson), who lives reclusively at the now-deserted summer-camp set; it releases August 7 in the US and Australia and August 21 in the UK.
- The article argues that sleek, minimalist post-2010s aesthetics — "vaguely Scandinavian surfaces" found at Apple Stores and Blank Street Coffee — leave horror settings too "ordered and empty," since smart home speakers have replaced grandfather clocks, record players, and dusty tomes.
- Older horror demonstrated the functional power of analogue tech: The Ring used a cursed videotape and a landline call delivering news of impending death, while The Blair Witch Project's jittery camcorder POV gave it a frantic, unsettled feel that crystal-clear phone cameras couldn't replicate.
- Schoenbrun cited childhood fifth-grade visits to local video stores as inspiration for Camp Miasma, calling the aesthetic "yearning" — a gen Z buzzword for longing for a world the directors "can't even remember."
Why it matters: For horror filmmakers, the shift away from analogue technology has thinned out the visual and physical texture the genre depends on for suspense — a problem indie directors are now exploiting by deliberately setting scenes in pre-2000s environments, giving low-budget films both an aesthetic edge and built-in nostalgia appeal with younger audiences who never lived through the era.
