You can tell what is on the minds of the collective consciousness by surveying the media being consumed in highest quantities. In this way, what people gravitate towards is as enlightening as answers to a Rorschach test. Movies, television, books, and music have a story to tell beyond their own specific narratives. Such stories aren’t always easy to hear, but are important to recognize, regardless. This is Generation Media, a glimpse of what is being said through the emergence of our media consumption.

Cinema of Trauma

The movies of the 1970s chafed against the establishment and launched the careers of many who would ultimately come to define the establishment. The ’80s fused the traditional and sentimental with forward-thinking narrative devices and hailed a new classic era embodied by a hopefulness even in the bleakest of settings. The ’90s was a new golden age for comedy, frequently identified not by great jokes and lasting storylines, but by how far the envelope could be pushed, and how much could one get away with.

The 2020s on the other hand…

Advance notice and trigger warning. This series will explore subjects that might be disturbing to some readers, and will go into some depth about examples in media, so spoilers will be ahead. Even so, we believe the productions noted were intended to start conversations, so we believe this is our good-faith entry into such discussions. If this sounds to you like too much to absorb at this moment, we understand if you choose to not proceed. Thank you in advance for your understanding.

Three of 2026’s most notable hit films focused on seriously dark subjects, and did so in unexpected ways: date rape; the horrors of the world one knows becoming twisted, barely recognizable, and perverted by seemingly indifferent intelligence; and a dread that you might be a good person, striving to do the right thing even though the odds against success grow increasingly against your favor, and in the end you will still be consumed by that which you tried to fight.

The present generation is seeing their very real world being mirrored darkly in horror movies. They see the mythological promise of themselves doing better than the previous generation, and the one before that, as a cruel joke, set upon a bonfire of debt, climate degradation, the promise that they will “own nothing and be happy,” that the A.I. onslaught will make not just their careers but all careers obsolete, and even that relationships (romantic, platonic, or otherwise) are pathways to harm.

Obsession

The “Cornell 7” case involves a civil lawsuit filed by a “Jane Doe” alleging she was drugged and gang-raped at the Chi Phi fraternity in 2024. The more that is revealed about this terrible event, the more one’s mind is cast back to the breakout hit film of this year, Obsession. In it, a young man longs for the attention of a woman friend, but he is too scared to try to ask her. Instead, he gives into the temptation of a mystical trinket, making a wish that she would love only him.

It works, sort of. She is fully obsessed with the man, to the point of self-destruction and violence. She seems corrupted and broken, and there’s good reason. As we learn later in the story, her consciousness has been essentially held hostage inside her as a malevolent force puppets her body to fulfill this wish he has made. She is fully aware of what he has done – and is doing – every horrible break of boundaries against her, but helpless to defend or even speak for herself.

Worse, as the story goes deeper down this hole, it becomes clear to him of what he has done, what is happening to her, what he is inflicting upon her and, even so, he won’t stop. While her soul is made captive by this evil, the greater evil is that he wished it upon her, and even in knowing this directly, he likes the ends and ignores the means. No mincing words here: she cannot consent to any of this, even if her body seemingly is consenting. He is raping her. His arc goes from pathetic loser to full-on villain, but not one that is a mustache-twiddling cartoon. No, he’s just a basic-builder’s-beige human who lets what he wants usurp what is right, even as he comes to know he is in the wrong (in the most terrible way).

Backrooms

Kane Parsons, the creator of Backrooms – originally a YouTube series he based upon a prominent creepypasta (essentially a horrific Internet meme that gets cut-and-pasted and made more disturbing with each reiteration) – intentionally or unintentionally tapped into one of humanity’s greatest fears: of experiencing the world you know, and the people within it, changing, distorting, being corrupted, or at the bare minimum becoming unrecognizable from that which you have known.

Everyone has had that dream where someone you love, be it a parent or friend; a place; or simply a wholesome feeling, turns on you. Things so banal and boring as an empty room, becomes something of dread: that empty room stretching out almost infinitely. Inside these jaundiced-yellow rooms are objects half-remembered, sticking out of walls or floors, chairs that can never be sat upon, or doors to nowhere, or walls of nowhere that are secret doors. And there are monsters. These monsters are warped renditions of real-world identities, dream-logic renditions only half-realized from waking up too fast. These id-creatures embody the worst of their forebears, an indication of what they themselves are becoming, perhaps.

Over the past ten years, people have seen the mutation of family and friends; loved ones and faith leaders, flip-flopping from their former selves into polar opposites. This is seen most clearly in Christian communities. For decades, churches espoused the doctrines of “love thy neighbor,” “welcome the stranger,” “if you have done this unto the least of My brethren, you have done it unto Me,” and “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” Today, we hear things like, “compassion is the real sin,” “Jesus is too woke to deserve being followed anymore,” and the like.

Besides churches, sanctuaries that used to represent places of safety, like schools, have been engulfed regularly in violence. They look like bland, boring places but at any given moment seem like they could erupt into gunfire and chaos. Places of entertainment and joy, like backyard barbecues, concerts, movie theaters distort and devolve.

Hard to say that this is an intentional parallel from Parsons, who is only 21 years old and has lived through the school-shooting rise as almost a “norm,” but one imagines this feeling of terror lurking behind even the quietest, most yawn-inducing corner has some connection to such lived experience.

Resident Evil (written and directed by Zach Cregger)

What in the world does a video game movie have to say about the state of our lives?

Before we proceed, it is worth noting that another horror movie arrived this year and did very poorly. Ice Cream Man by Eli Roth (Thanksgiving, Hostel) is based on a horror comic. The movie tells a story of an evil ice cream vendor whose goods corrupt those who eat them – mostly children – and send them on murderous rampages.

It sounds to many like a poor knockoff of director Zach Cregger’s 2025 film Weapons. One year later, Cregger turned his eyes to this venerated video game franchise. Its previous cinematic and television entries are, shall we say, not up to the task. It was Cregger’s stated intention to not adapt any of the games, but instead, the construct of the games, the feeling of heightening danger and, of course, dread.

The protagonist of the movie is a rather derpy naif, good hearted and good intentioned, just trying to get by and make it in this typically fraught world. Then there is the introduction of bio-product, the Umbrella Corporation, and Raccoon City. And the infected.

We have come to love this guy, even as he has been forced by his circumstances to cross a few of his personal redlines to achieve his goal. Was this the start of the corruption, long before the actual infection? Was just being in this world the start of his downfall, and in the end, if this is the way the whole world is, wasn’t he born doomed?

This is particularly cutting for Gen Z and Gen Alphas who, like the Millennials, are caught in the cycle of doing worse than the generation before that, and the one before that. They are inheriting the broken remains and neither the tools nor the instruction or funding to make it better. Their trusted leaders have abandoned them, proven to have feet of clay and ringworm. The corporations and the money-men could not care less if they lived or died. This is and is not the undercurrent of the world Resident Evil describes. This seems very much like where we are right now.

We live in fear and dread. We don’t need zombies in what is already before us, but art imitates life, after all.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day

We have focused on horror movies up to this point, and typically horror movies delve into the dark side of life, so one might believe that I, as the commentator, have skewed the data. Horror movies, be they good or bad, tend to have big audience numbers. That doesn’t really say that this present audience is siding with cinematic doomscrolling. What about the biggest movie of 2026, and one of the biggest movies of all time, Spider-Man: Brand New Day?

It is a huge example of crowd-pleasing, blockbuster entertainment. There’s no doubt about this. But it is also about Peter Parker, who in the last movie, No Way Home, asked for a magic spell to be cast that all would forget who Peter Parker even was. The purpose for this, a spiritual reconstruction of the One More Day storyline from the Marvel comics’ series, was the reckoning that so long as people knew and loved Peter Parker, it could be found out that he is Spider-Man. Therefore, those who want to go after and hurt Spider-Man would make pawns of these innocents. Better that they never knew him and, in essence, erase his connection to them to save them from being used in that way.

Brand New Day finds the webslinger back in the orbit of M.J. and Ned, but as a stranger. Like the horror movies spoken of before, he now lives in a world that is familiar but cold and foreign at the same time. If anything, the massive success of this popcorn thriller is the exception proving the rule. Peter Parker demonstrates his selflessness but embodies that with great sacrifice comes great loneliness. Doing the right thing is rewarded with isolation, a fracturing of the self, forced into becoming something they are not, or in Resident Evil, being consumed by the unspeakable otherness despite the noble intent.

Being a Marvel movie, of course Spider-Man emerges from the last act somewhat renewed, but it is rewarding that it is not an easy victory. Peter still lives in the grey, as it were, but there is a tether to hope and a lifeline. He may not get the ending he wants, but in this storyline, the conclusion doesn’t foreshadow doom.

Well, maybe it does foreshadow Doom, though.

How Long Will It Last?

We all know trends move in cycles, but this cinema of trauma, and the slow wading through that trauma, is one that’s likely to persist and endure. We see no glimmers of change in our real world. If anything, we see these only metastasizing. Our media is a bent reflection of our reality, and if reality won’t budge, our renditions of escapism probably won’t either.