IndieWire asks two Gen Z horror directors to define their own subgenre

On 28 August 2026, IndieWire published a video conversation between Kane Parsons and Alex Ullom, framed around a question the trade press has spent the past year trying to settle on its own: what exactly is liminal horror, and why has it travelled so quickly with younger audiences. The headline the outlet chose to lead with, "The World Is a Lot Right Now," doubles as the subgenre's self-description and as IndieWire's editorial signal that it intends to take that self-description seriously.

The sit-down pairs two directors who have become the genre's most-cited breakout names. Parsons is credited as the director of the "Backrooms" short-form project. Ullom is credited as the director of the feature "It Ends." IndieWire's framing positions the conversation as a back-and-forth between the two, rather than two parallel profiles. The trade's own headline phrase carries the subgenre's working tagline, and the choice to lead with it reads as a trade publication borrowing the subgenre's own vocabulary before imposing one of its own.

The thesis this publication takes from the IndieWire sit-down is that liminal horror is now being defined, in the trade press, by the people who built it inside short-form video rather than by the critics who arrived after. That is a small but real shift in who gets to name a genre.

What the IndieWire headline and the clips establish

The available source items are IndieWire's own framing of the conversation and two short exclusive clips published via the outlet's Telegram channel on the same day, 28 August 2026. From those items, the verified spine of the story is narrow. IndieWire has staged a public conversation between Parsons and Ullom, framed the conversation as an attempt to explain the liminal horror craze, and chosen the phrase "The world is a lot right now" as the headline carrying that attempt.

The exclusive clips, published on IndieWire's Telegram channel on 28 August 2026, are billed as excerpts from the same conversation. They are not full transcripts; they are promotional cuts intended to direct readers back to the main piece. What they confirm is the format: a two-director conversation, rather than separate interviews, on a single video property.

What the conversation is, and what it is not

Monexus analysis: the interesting thing about IndieWire staging the conversation this way is what it concedes about the trade press's usual role. IndieWire is, structurally, the place where the industry comes to have its categories clarified. That work usually happens in a critic's essay or a producer's profile. Here the work has been handed to the two directors, in their own voices, and the outlet has chosen to lead with one of them.

That does not mean the subgenre is now formally canonised. IndieWire is one trade outlet, and a sit-down video is one format. What the framing does establish is that the liminal horror subgenre now has a pair of named directors the trade press is willing to foreground, and a one-line self-description the trade press is willing to print as a headline.

The Gen Z framing the headline carries

The phrase "The world is a lot right now" is doing the load-bearing work in the IndieWire headline. It is the genre's emotional register compressed into one line, and IndieWire's decision to lead with it is, in this publication's reading, a signal that the outlet is treating the subgenre's self-presentation as newsworthy on its own terms.

Monexus assessment: the headline is also a generational claim, in shorthand. IndieWire has chosen to introduce a subgenre to its industry readership through a sentence that names the present tense, rather than through the usual trade-press move of slotting a new cycle into a familiar lineage. The framing the outlet chose is closer to a mood than a genealogy.

What the conversation does not specify

The available source items are three IndieWire posts and the IndieWire article they point to. They establish the headline, the format of the conversation, the two named directors, and the projects they are credited with. They do not specify either director's age, the original upload date of the "Backrooms" short, the running time of the IndieWire conversation, the release year, platform, runtime, or plot shape of "It Ends," or specific view-count figures for the "Backrooms" uploads. This article has not independently established those details, and they have been left out rather than reconstructed.

The next test, which the IndieWire framing does not pretend to answer, is whether the trade press will keep borrowing the subgenre's own vocabulary or whether it will start to impose its own. The headline suggests which way IndieWire is leaning.

Desk note: IndieWire framed the piece as a two-director conversation and led with the subgenre's own self-description. This publication reads that framing as a trade outlet conceding, for now, that the people who built liminal horror inside short-form video also get the first word on what to call it.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://t.me/indiewire/32651
• https://www.indiewire.com/news/general-news/kane-parsons-alex-ullom-discuss-liminal-horror-watch-1235213008/
• https://t.me/indiewire/32649
• https://t.me/indiewire/32648