A New Wave Arrives With Its Dread Intact
Alex Ullom’s It Ends is not simply another horror film – it is a generational statement, arriving at a moment when young directors are systematically dismantling what mainstream horror has looked like for decades.
The Anxieties Behind the Camera
What separates this emerging cohort of filmmakers from their predecessors is less technique than psychology. Ullom and his contemporaries grew up inside conditions that older horror directors could only imagine as fiction: algorithmic surveillance, climate dread, social collapse performed in real time on small screens. The monsters in their films are not imported from folklore or pulp tradition – they are built directly from the texture of lived Gen Z experience.
It Ends positions Ullom squarely within that cohort. The film functions as a kind of translation – anxiety that exists as ambient noise in daily life made loud, visible, and inescapable on screen. That is a different project than what slasher cycles or supernatural franchises were doing. Those genres processed the fears of their eras too, but at a greater remove. The new wave closes the distance entirely.
There is something almost documentary about the impulse, even when the imagery is fully fantastical. These directors seem less interested in escapism than in confrontation – using horror’s permission to go to extreme places as a way to drag real psychological weight into the open. The screen becomes a place to look directly at what younger audiences already feel but rarely see named.
That instinct has commercial consequences as well as artistic ones. Horror has long been one of cinema’s most reliable genres for launching careers precisely because budgets stay low and audiences stay loyal. But what Ullom’s generation is doing changes the formula: they are not just working within the genre’s economics, they are using those economics to push content that would face resistance in other formats.
Upending a Film Landscape
The phrase “upending the film landscape” gets applied carelessly to almost any stylistic shift, but in this case the structural argument holds. Studios and streamers spent years optimizing horror for the broadest possible demographic – softening edges, explaining monsters, resolving ambiguity. The young directors arriving now are doing the opposite. Ambiguity is the point. The monster often isn’t separate from the protagonist at all.
Ullom’s entry into this cohort matters because it signals the movement has enough members to constitute something beyond individual auteur taste. A cohort implies shared formation – shared cultural conditions, shared media diet, shared sense of what needs to be said and what the genre is capable of saying. When multiple directors across different projects converge on similar formal and thematic choices without coordinating, that convergence deserves attention.
Gen Z grew up with the internet not as a novel technology but as baseline reality. Their horror reflects that. Fear in these films is frequently networked, ambient, and without a clean origin point – which is exactly how dread functions when you have been online since childhood. You absorb anxiety from thousands of sources simultaneously, none of them entirely verifiable, none of them entirely dismissible. Translating that to screen requires a different grammar than the grammar of the jump scare or the haunted house.
What makes directors like Ullom interesting beyond the generational thesis is craft. A filmmaker can identify the right anxieties to depict and still make a bad film. The fact that It Ends has placed him in serious critical conversation suggests he is not only diagnosing his generation’s fears but finding formal means to make those fears work cinematically – pacing, image, sound design deployed in service of something specific rather than something generic.
The critical apparatus is still calibrating how to evaluate this work. Reviewers trained on older horror frameworks sometimes reach for comparisons that don’t quite fit, because the emotional register is different. These films are not trying to frighten you and then release you. They are trying to leave something behind – a residue of unease that persists because it was never fully exorcised. That is a harder thing to pull off, and a harder thing to review.
What the Genre Now Has to Carry
Horror has always served as a pressure valve for social anxiety – that much is well established across film history. But the specific pressures Ullom’s generation is processing are unusually diffuse and unusually large. Individual mortality, yes, but also collective ones: ecological, political, technological. A genre built on personal terror is being asked to metabolize civilizational dread, and the filmmakers attempting that are necessarily inventing as they go.
Ullom is twenty-something and already operating at the level of a director who has thought carefully about what he wants horror to do. The question his arrival raises is not whether Gen Z has found its horror voice – It Ends suggests it has – but whether the industry infrastructure around these films will give that voice room to develop without flattening it into something more familiar and less dangerous. The studios that distribute these films and the algorithms that surface them have their own ideas about what fear is supposed to look like.
