From Obsession to Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, a new wave of movies are ditching minimalism for retro settings

The indie-horror hit films Obsession and Backrooms opened this summer’s movie season with a bang, each grossing hundreds of millions of dollars and turning out legions of younger moviegoers. Many have pointed out the similarity between the films: both were made for comparatively minuscule budgets by gen Z directors – Curry Barker and Kane Parsons – who first rose to prominence on YouTube.

Fewer people are talking about the other quality the two movies share: a steady stream of analogue props and production design that plunges you into some bygone pre-digital era. Obsession’s lead characters Bear and Nikki work at a mom-and-pop music store, take rides in Bear’s vintage station wagon and the plot centers around a kitschy, old-fashioned gag gift. In Backrooms, Mary hawks her self-help cassette tapes on late-night infomercials, Clark smacks his TV to adjust the fuzzy signal – in the HDTV age, no one has done this for decades – and the wall-to-wall carpeted, ceiling-tiled backrooms look straight out of a long-abandoned office park on the side of the highway.

The latest in our series of writers paying tribute to their go-to comfort films celebrates Steven Spielberg’s escapist globe-trotting adventure

The ancient Greek philosopher Lucretius writes in his epic poem On the Nature of Things: “It is comforting, when winds are whipping up the waters of the vast sea, to watch from land the severe trials of another person … it is comforting to see from what troubles you yourself are exempt.”

This feeling of living dangerously by proxy is exactly why I find it so relaxing to watch Indiana Jones in 1981’s Raiders of the Lost Ark go through an endless stream of trials and tribulations: trekking through the hot, sticky jungle. Avoiding venomous spiders and snakes. Being betrayed by not one, but two of his colleagues. Jumping over bottomless chasms and outrunning giant boulders, only to be thwarted by his arch-rival and chased by a tribe of bow-and-arrow-toting Amazonians. And that’s just the first 15 minutes of the film.