As Hollywood continues to navigate the industry-shifting success of Obsession and Backrooms, Christopher Nolan has weighed in on the phenomenon, while expressing his interest in making a horror film himself.

Ahead of the release of his adaptation of The Odyssey, the director has cited the success of Backrooms and Obsession as evidence that young audiences’ attention spans aren’t too short. “Those films are so mysterious and ruminative,” he told The Telegraph. “Parts of Backrooms are like David Lynch at his most obscure. And yet young people can’t get enough of them.”

Nolan added that younger audiences are also rejecting AI. “Their judgment of AI slop has been immediate and harsh. They see it for what it is very quickly — and it’s much easier for them to identify it, because it grew out of an online world they know really well.”

In an interview with Fred Asquith, when asked whether he would want to follow in the footsteps of one of his idols, Stanley Kubrick, and make a horror film, Nolan responded, “I’d love to do a horror movie, but it’s all about the idea. It’s all about: Is there a story that really compels you?”

“There’s a sense in which Oppenheimer is a horror movie,” he elaborated. “It certainly was very dark material to engage with for that long. And there are very significant elements of horror baked into The Odyssey in the original text. So I’ve tried to fully embrace those because I think it’s a genre that’s really essentially cinematic. It’s a visceral genre, and it’s one where you’re really trying to give the audience a feeling of what the characters are experiencing.”

The Odyssey is in cinemas from July 17th.