‘Obsession,’ ‘Backrooms,’ and What YouTube Can Teach Movies
Two new horror phenomena directed by precocious 20-somethings reveal a lot about the future of filmmaking. And moviegoing.
Welcome back to Projections, the only movie newsletter that boldly explores the liminal state in all forms—but especially if the media is physical.
Today I’m digging into two remarkable May movie release stories that are inextricably linked—Obsession and Backrooms. Where they come from, and where they’re taking us.
Thanks to everyone who signed up to read extended thoughts on my first Cannes Film Festival. While not the best slate I could have hoped for, the experience was unforgettable and I’m already plotting how to avoid missing crucial titles and effectively navigate the hype train in 2027. I also look forward to seeing how attending the festival unlocks the rest of my moviewatching year.
OK, let’s get into it.
I’ve been listening to Jimi Hendrix a lot lately. I don’t know what put him into my mind, but he’s back in there. Hendrix is a landmark artist for teenagers discovering a transformational moment in rock ’n’ roll, when the genre firmly entered a psychedelic mode and altered its constitution. You grow out of him as a young person, and then, when you get much older, you grow back in. Hendrix represents a before-and-after—the language of guitar rock, with its rockabilly-blues origins and standard verse-chorus-verse structures disintegrated in Hendrix’s trail. He was the logical extension and conclusion of Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Muddy Waters, Buddy Holly, Dick Dale, Link Wray, Pete Townshend, Dave Davies, Eric Clapton, and many more. No one has really surpassed him as a cultural figure holding a guitar since. Hendrix is both mythic and institutional history now. With his brief catalog having been pored over by musicians, scholars, and fans for half a century, he’s more like Marilyn Monroe or JFK, a ’60s icon who doubles as foundational wallpaper. But I keep coming back, trying to recapture the feeling of hearing his songs for the first time—the mournful restraint of “Little Wing,” the full-throated blues thunder of “If 6 Was 9,” the chaotic proto-Led Zeppelin frenzy of “Manic Depression.” I can’t shake that feeling I first had. Ecstasy. Like walls coming down.
I have an addictive relationship to music, especially micro moments of catharsis. I can listen to 10-second snatches of a song hundreds of times in a row to conjure that ineffable emotional connection. Hendrix’s song “Are You Experienced?” is one of those examples in my life. It opens with a drum-bass-guitar recording played in reverse, which sounds like a wire brush being rubbed along the fretboard, before exploding into a gong-like pronouncement of rock exultation—BRONG!—as an A-flat octave chimes and Hendrix lazily croons, “If you can just …. get your …. mind together …” It’s one of the sonic signatures of 1960s popular music. Welcome to the new age, it seems to harken, what’s past was merely prologue. Hendrix was 24 years old when he wrote and recorded the song.
I’ve been thinking about Hendrix, and many of the artists I’ve spent my life celebrating and contextualizing, who all did such form-breaking work early in their lives. Movies and music are alike in this way—they require a tremendous amount of technical knowledge and practice, but some of the most memorable and transformative outcomes are made by relative novices. Not knowing too much is a skill unto itself. I bring this up because the two filmmakers whose work is resonating so profoundly this month are also at the very beginning of something, and how they are using the tools at their disposal to distort and redefine the form is becoming a fascination of mine.
