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“Oh my god, there’s something in the room…chairs!!” (No disrespect to Obsession or Backrooms, I just thought this was funny)
Transcript
A comic in 2 parts:
Old Horror Icons
A picture of Freddy Krueger, from the movie A Nightmare on Elm Street, with the caption: Melted Faced Killer with a Knife Hand
A picture of Pennywise, from the movie IT, with the caption: Creepy Clown Killer
Modern Horror Icons
A picture of a liminal office as seen in The Backrooms with the caption: A Room
A picture of a sad girl, Freaky Nikki from the movie Obsession, with the caption: A guy’s girlfriend
I would love to meet some guy’s girlfriend in a room. I would give her the d, all day and all night and everything is blue. Shit, sorry. Music in the background.
I was half expecting “voice call” to be on here.
All the modern horror icons can be summarized to muh mental health.
Except terrifier, which is just a reflection of weird degenerate clowns with chainsaws out to kill everybody; like Javier Milei and Elon Musk
Both are good? There’s different types of horror.
Although I don’t really like the older horror movies. The effects and acting aren’t good enough. Scream will always be an exception but that’s because it’s more comedic horror.
I’m not sure if I could ever find Freddy or Pennywise scary anyway. Not that much scares me at this point.
The beautiful thing about the new horror icons is they’re so cost efficient!
It’s just being reductive about modern horror and descriptive about old horror. Here, you can just as easily flip the script:
Old horror: A clown. Dreams.
Modern horror: Endless trauma labyrinth. Male fantasy gone horribly wrong.

Good explanation
Old: we knew who the enemy was
New: the enemy is everywhere
(Pre-amble, I don’t think the meme should be taken seriously and I do find it funny)
Horror is my favourite genre because it genuinely seeks to express the most primal and furious of all emotions: fear. From the goriest, straight-forward splatter fest to the subtlest discomforts of tense artsy horror films, the popular and cult favourite movies offer a fantastic reflection of that generation/culture’s deepest vulnerabilities.
Slashers like Friday the 13th were about the internalized self-criticism of modern, white Judea-Christian values (pre-marital sex, drugs, etc) and Nightmare on Elm Street was about parents, society, the government, etc, being unable and unwilling to help with the problems they created, problems that turn lethal. Suicide due to depression from repression, OD’ing from drugs because you need a way out, getting killed because you got mixed up with the “wrong” crowd at the wrong time, these were all things that happened to people because the “system” pushed you into a corner, and vilified any means you sought to escape.
Even “torture porn” like Saw was about feeling trapped and what extremes you’d take to “free” yourself. Terrifier, too, can offer a reflection of extreme violence offering some form of release.
Backrooms and Obsession are so relevant because they too talk about our fears of being trapped in the endlessly mundane, or attachments that we cling to beyond the safety of ourselves and others.
This is a really general rant so I’ve glossed over and even ignored so many nuances. Not to mention that I’m really not eloquent enough to really hit every nail on the hand… and each person will pull their own unique experiences from horror.
I genuinely love it when people find something they can connect with in horror, regardless of what generation or subgenre they find.
Backrooms resonates with people because it represents the fear of the unknowable, the fear of being in the presence of something you can’t see or identify, or understand its intentions. It’s practically infinite, easy to get lost in, and is way less empty than it looks. Maybe you’re fine. Maybe you’re seconds away from death. You can’t know.
Isn’t that just life in general?
Exactly.
Is the Obsessioner even an icon?
She’s getting there. The insane pouty frown is certainly a meme already:

Slightly related, but my wife won’t watch horror films because ghosts and zombies and shit are too scary for her.
She loves watching true-life documentaries about unsolved cases of people who just vanish and theres not even any evidence that they’re dead. Just gone. Which is infinitely scarier to me than any knife-clown or ghost-botherers
Documentaries aren’t usually made to be scary though, there are no jump scares and other tricks that horror movie makers employ. So while life can be truly horrendous, I can see why she can handle these documentaries.
You said documentaries aren’t “usually” made to be scary, so you’re implying that there’s some documentaries out there that’s got jump scares and shit. It makes me want to see such a documentary.
Probably not jump scares, but scenes with actors that do employ tricks with lighting, music, practical effects, and other cinematic tools that increase tension.
Adding to this, the documentaries also include interviews with people saying “I thought they should look into this more and they didn’t”, or “Our department was really trying to solve this, and it just took awhile.” The implication that someone out there cares. It is less isolating than horror movies generally are, which tend to show how things went wrong usually because no one cared or no one knew anything was up. I guess the documentary is the natural sequel story - we couldn’t stop the bad thing from happening, maybe multiple times, but we are at least aware of it and trying to figure it out.
It is also the athmosphere of anxiety. Horror movies try to intentionally create feelings of fear, and uneasiness, which then is present in the color scheme, camera angles, music (or lack of), spacing… everything. In documentaries and the like, usually the incidents themselves, also speak for themself.
I cannot take horror at all either - I cannot usually watch even horror comedies - but one of my favorites, is to watch real tsunami footage. The point is not to see people dying or some unreal scary stuff, it is to witness the real absoluteness of destruction nature is capable of, yet also people managing to survive, and help each other, in the middle of it.
Thank you for the spoiler. I had no idea who “guy’s girlfriend” was meant to be. Well, I still mostly don’t, but at least I’ve heard of the source.
Shit got a lot more real if you ask me.
This new obsession movie (I still loved her despite her flaws) and these ari aster movies are true horror.
Old horror is dead
We forgetting that a house was a horror icon for decades?
I thought The Money Pit was a comedy?
It’s not very scary when faced with the current housing crisis. 😔
Where are the cheap haunted houses?! I desperately need one. I’d gladly share the space with any ghosts or monsters in there
Amityville horror? More like Amityville Bargain!
Me and that fuckin Lamp can divide the place up for all I care, I’ll get that homie his own kitchen.
Watch The Good Place. Life can be Hell.
Yeah, like there’s this place with really good chicken, but you can’t eat any because that means you hate gay people. But it’s sooooo good.
Fountain of Chowder = horror










