A24If nothing else, the horror genre has always been one built on reinvention. The passage of time and socio-cultural transformation are constantly influencing trends, which means there’s an ocean of difference between the climate that gave us movies like the original Nightmare on Elm Street versus today’s outings like Obsession or Hokum. The mainstream horror of the ‘80s was defined by the slasher, the early 2000s by J-horror remakes and the rise of “torture” flicks, and the late-2010s and 2020s thus far have been dominated by allegory-heavy, arthouse-adjacent “elevated” horror.The nature of that audience/artist ebb and flow in horror means that, like all studio filmmaking, it’s also beholden to the whims of what studios believe audiences have a taste for. Much in the way that Halloween inspired a wave of blade-wielding imitators and The Blair Witch Project led to a decade of vertigo-inducing camerawork, the success of 21-year-old Kane Parsons’ and A24’s Backrooms is already making ripples across the industry. Already a number of films based on creepypasta-lite internet horror legends have been greenlit from major studios, with some serious weight attached — but is the Hollywood machine about to run face first into a wall due to the communal storytelling nature of many of these concepts?The succcess of Backrooms has inspired an appetite for internet horror in major studios, but that raises some important questions for the industry. | A24On July 15, Reddit user r/GnarlyNet posted a thread explaining that a wallpaper design inspired by the Backrooms they’d listed on the print marketplace Redbubble was removed, the result of a copyright complaint submitted by A24 Films LLC. A few other complaints from disparate parts of the internet followed, including one by mobile game developer Davilkus Games, who alleged that they’d received copyright strikes on the Google Play Store in regards to the game Backrooms: Level 94, although they later clarified that this was an error on Google’s part and unrelated to A24. It didn’t take long for Kane Parsons (who has already called Backrooms an “open-source, public-domain idea”) to get involved, responding to the Reddit post promising to look into the matter.The official A24 Instagram page for Backrooms responded with a story post, declaring the copyright takedowns were an accident and asserting that they have no plans to go after the film’s dedicated online community of creators. According to leaked posts from Parsons on a Discord channel, the error was the result of an outdated tracking system designed to target camrips and were not indications of a shift in the studio’s feelings about the ownership of the concept.The original concept that inspired Kane Parsons’ Backrooms shorts came from 4chan, and he has been adamant about maintaining that open-source approach to the property. | Kane ParsonsIt seems at first like an “all's well that ends well” situation, but the mishap does raise some sobering questions about the tidal wave of internet horror that we’re about to receive in the next few years. Already there are confirmed projects on the way based on the SCP Foundation, the Mandela Catalogue, Cartoon Cat, and Siren Head — each of these, with the exception of the SCP Foundation, has a definitive creator (Alex Kister for Mandela, and Trevor Henderson for both Cartoon Cat and Siren Head), and each of them maintain a dedicated online community built around fan fiction and fan art. The relatively communal nature of fan engagement with user-created art is a common experience for indie content creators on the internet, but it’s a new dimension for a film industry that has always had a complicated relationship with the idea of ownership — what happens when a studio that owns the film rights to one of these properties unleashes a torrent of copyright strikes against fan art?While the upcoming V/H/S: SCP is being produced by the relatively indie studios Spooky Pictures and Image Nation, Cartoon Cat and Siren Head are being produced by TriStar Pictures and Warner Bros. respectively. Trevor Henderson, while not directing, can be expected to be directly involved with both adaptations of his work, but what about the SCP Foundation? The original 4chan post that birthed the concept was from user Moto42, but it was based on a copyrighted sculpture by artist Izumi Katō, and it only provided the description for one particular creature — the SCP Foundation wiki (which catalogues the findings of a secret society dedicated to covering up the existence of supernatural abnormalities) is filled with thousands of entries, all belonging to a vast community of storytellers. Unless V/H/S: SCP creates entirely new SCP anomalies for each short in the anthology film, how will it credit each creator whose work it uses?The V/H/S series of anthology horror films have always maintained an indie spirit, but how will that translate to adapting a communal piece of online storytelling like the SCP mythos? | ShudderHorror has always been a genre directly feeding off the impulses and fears of its audience, but this new trend of internet horror films is making that relationship incredibly literal. While the success of Backrooms has certainly replaced the eyes of many studio heads with dollar signs, they should also pay close attention to the massive blunder A24 just narrowly avoided. These concepts, even the ones birthed by specific creators, are popular in part because of the online communities of artists, writers, and even game developers who have been directly inspired to create their own supplemental works — and it would be smart to tread carefully when trying to earn their patronage.Backrooms is available to rent on digital platforms.