Horror’s Hollywood takeover is an exciting moment – but won’t someone think of the squeamish?

Did you go to the cinema this week? If you did, that rumbling you felt wasn’t down to those spicy nachos you ate. Well, it might have been – 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 “creepypasta” horror story shared across the internet – 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 – a far more expensive movie that was expected to squat atop the box office for much of May and June – into third place only underscores what an unlikely cinematic revolution this is. It’s inarguably an exciting moment, particularly given the long shadow of risk-averse, IP-worshipping blockbusters this new era is arriving out of. A new generation of film-makers, emerging from the internet armed with original ideas and able to work with tight budgets, are succeeding wildly, outside the studio system (to the list we should add YouTuber Mark Fischbach, who came close to topping the box office earlier this year with a film that, remarkably, he distributed himself). So it feels a little Scrooge-like to have a complaint about this thrilling moment for film – but I do have one, and it’s this: why does it always have to be horror? Is the only way of getting an original idea on to cinema screens via homicidal…