The modern audience member is a creature of many wonders. It craves a dopamine hit from scrolling TikTok mid-film, brightness kindly lowered so as not to entirely ruin my screening of Backrooms.
That courtesy didn’t stop me sneaking a peek at what the creature was watching. And cinema, as an art form, has not yet reckoned with the lengths this thing will go to. The depths of its hunger. I knew I’d seen it somewhere before — that eerie yellow glow, those lights, that handheld lurch. It took a second to place it.
The person two seats down was watching the YouTube version of the film. The one playing, right now, on a screen ten times the size of their phone.
It had been a while since I’d tasted disappointment that keenly in a cinema. But there it was: not distraction, not boredom — preparation. They weren’t half-watching. They were cross-referencing. Somewhere between the trailer and the ticket, watching a film had become homework, and the homework was the lore.
We have come to dub it exactly that — the “lore.” The family tree of every character, the timeline behind every reveal, the cinematic universe’s tax filings. The explainer videos, the lore dives, the breakdowns of a film, a book, even a relationship scandal — multiplying by the second. Modern audiences are more obsessed with the context of a story than the experience it delivers. They don’t want to be unsettled. They want to be briefed.
Which is a problem, because horror is a genre built on experience. A ride. It runs on not knowing.
Take Iron Lung, adapted from the indie game of the same name — minimalist horror in its purest form, an atmospheric descent told through sound, flashing images, and just enough dialogue to set the stage and no more. What followed its release wasn’t praise for that restraint. It was a race: video after video sprinting to be first to “uncover” the mysteries of The Quiet Rapture, as though the film were a locked box rather than a feeling. Nobody wanted to sit in the dark with it. They wanted the map.
Why not leave the lore to the Markipliers and David Szymanskis of the world, and let the rest of us just take the ride?
Because the modern audience member is no fool. They need to know. What is life, after all, without a piece of lore in your pocket to drop at a café table and impress five people with?
Here’s the irony: the films that became phenomena did it by withholding. Inception still has us arguing about the spinning top, and Nolan offers nothing but a shrug and a smile — because that shrug is the fuel. It’s what powers the late-night arguments about what could and couldn’t be true. Backrooms began life as a single 4chan post; the theories descended in a deluge, the creepypastas multiplied, and Kane Parsons turned it into a short film with over eight million views that explains nothing. It simply is. It leaves you with questions, and the questions are the point.
Even Star Wars — now one of the most relentless lore machines ever built — didn’t open that way. A New Hope dropped us mid-war, no encyclopedia required: empires, rebels, laser swords, a little green man, go. We trusted the filmmakers to fill it in later, and they did. It was only once the lore became the product, decades on, that the magic started leaking out.
That’s the thing we’ve forgotten to protect. Not knowing isn’t a gap in the experience. It is the experience. The dark is supposed to be dark.
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