THE INTERNET NEW WAVE
Guest Essay by Tzvi
A man in a leather jacket and sunglasses stands in a harshly lit mall, “You’re a slug,” the man says to various passersbys, who hurry by him in fear. “You’re a slug begging for slime.” Among makeup stands and giant ads of copy-pasted men and women smiling down upon the shoppers, we survey from a high angle, with a long lens, as he terrorizes the bystanders: “Go and buy shit…go get your slime.”
The man in the jacket, whom we know little about except for his repetitive nihilistic voice-over: “I’m really fucking smart,” “I’m a genius on different levels of different types of scientific political levels. I can’t be fooled with your politics and your laws… They don’t even know…” falls in love with one of his harassees at the mall, a red-haired woman. Suddenly, his angry, misanthropic feelings towards society disappear, and they live a beautiful romantic life in a montage—dancing on hills, cuddling on a swing—until, in a sudden sharp turn, the woman falls ill and dies. The nameless sunglasses-bearing man realizes that his original philosophy was the only way: that this world is indeed packed to the brim with consumerist slugs and aimless drones.
The final image: The man is standing in a hotel room, rifles on his bed. He loads one with a magazine, looking down at the traffic zipping by, we hear his mantra: “You don’t even know….”
This is Conner O’Malley’s Slugs, a three-minute riptide of madness on the edge of the rising Internet New Wave; a loosely defined, frenzied, collage of internet-released films, devoid of melodrama and stilted mise-en-scène, often chock-full of internet aesthetics: vlog-sticks, Unreal Engine, Blender, AI, deepfakes, meme culture, and liminalcore. Slugs has amassed over a million views in several months, and is just one of the many modestly popular O’Malley films on his channel, and one of many irreverent and unambiguously ‘internet’ films among the zeroes and ones of the great collective web.
“That is why I would like to call this new age of cinema the age of camera-stylo (camera-pen),” said Alexander Astruc over seventy years ago. “This, of course, implies that the scriptwriter directs his own scripts; or rather, that the scriptwriter ceases to exist, for in this kind of filmmaking the distinction between author and director loses all meaning.”
Astruc’s famous essay, La caméra-stylo, became a template and influence on an earlier wave of films riding on cinema’s restless shores– the French New Wave. Their films were gritty, provocative, shot on the streets with natural light, and each filmmaker ‘drew’ with their own unmistakable “camera-pen,” creating highly personalized work—which would become known as auteur theory.
The Internet films often have little to no crew, a solitary artist writes and directs the work, releasing it without fanfare into the ether. It’s hard to conjure up a closer fulfillment to Astruc’s prophecy than these rising Internet auteurs, to whom art isn’t a nostalgic ode to older art, where homages are rare and tributes are nowhere to be found. On the Internet, you will find a televised revolution in its nascent stages, a swath of mind-bending and provocative films that tap into the very heart of the zeitgeist, that are not marred by decades of convention and dogma.
Francois Truffaut, who was strongly inspired by Astruc, penned an essay A Certain Tendency in French Cinema, making a case against what he called the “scriptwriters’ films”—films that relied heavily on neat formulas, shot on stages with artificial lighting, and adapted from safe literary works. Truffaut and his peers’ frustrations with the state of French cinema led them to create a film movement that would spread like wildfire throughout the world and birth a vibrant, living, and breathing cinema.
In 2025, things are not very different. Instead of elaborate sets being built on stage and a myriad of sluggish literary adaptations, we in the States have stages surrounded by blue, we have adaptations and remakes of superhero comics, theme park rides, popular movies, and, ironically, even some movies from the French New Wave. Film has by and large become self-referential, filled with references, homages, in-jokes, winks, easter eggs, and cameos. That’s not to say there aren’t great movies being made in the far corners of the world that push the ossifying limits—but in the grand scheme of things, film has grown risk-averse.
O’Malley’s madcap cinema garners more views than the average independent film, not necessarily because his films are ‘easy entertainment’ that play into our rapidly diminishing attention spans—on the contrary, O’Malley’s films are dense, painfully lonely, and strangely incisive, the next step in the evolution of auteur-driven cerebral filmmaking. The Internet has no executives, no suits to censor what an artist should do and not do, and this allows O’Malley to go places that the mainstream movie industry wouldn’t dare.
A man has dreams of becoming an actor, of becoming famous. He’s obsessed with impersonating Jim Carrey’s The Mask. He works as a cemetery security guard to make money, so hopefully one day he can fulfill his dreams. His hard-ass family despises him; his brother slams him against the wall, demanding he get a job. The only person who loves the man is his grandma—she believes in him wholeheartedly and laughs at his haunting routine when he dons the mask and performs a twisted Carrey impression, growling like a feral nutcase.
The man’s grandma dies, and as an unexpected silver lining, she leaves him enough money to try his luck in Hollywood. He finds himself living in LA in a boiler room with an unemployed slacker who watches Captain America when he’s anxious. O’Malley desperately tries to break into the industry, only to be taken advantage of and ridiculed mercilessly. He’s humiliated by a Russian prankster who holds a mock acting audition for a superhero film. He gets an acting teacher on Zoom, who leaves him hanging to go take care of his dogs. In a last-ditch effort at super-stardom, he joins the paparazzi, hoping that this could be a way in, which goes to pieces when he charges at Canadian improv legend Colin Mochrie, desperately trying to cut off his hair.
His unemployed Captain America-enthusiast landlord comforts him by spewing an insane conspiracy theory called “Yantianto,” explaining that Hollywood is run by sinister groups, and it’s all in fact one big cabal. The rant is captured incoherently, fast-cutting to 4chan-style websites, predominantly featuring John Cena, an old obsession of O’Malley. The man takes his landlord’s words to heart and embarks on a feverish odyssey to uncover this cabal lurking in the shadows of Beverly Hills.
Mostly depicted through a selfie stick, vlog-style, the film seamlessly switches mediums at times, jumping to Facebook Live and YouTube videos. It also blends the real with the staged—O’Malley interacts with real bystanders, speaking with people in cars passing by the Paramount lot. At times, fisheye lenses are used, bending the space to an extreme, creating a sickly sensation that some terrible disease is in the air.
The Mask on one level reads as a diss to the exploitative nature of Tinseltown and the “you could be a star” propaganda that’s poisoned the American bloodstream; but, ironically, the film itself—made outside the dream factory, almost entirely with a vlog stick—is just as robust as the kingdom of heaven the protagonist wants to break into. As if to say: the baton now belongs to us, the Internet Auteurs.
O’Malley’s films deal with the current cultural moment—the disillusionment of Americans who’ve been sold a bill of goods, the conspiratorial thinking that’s hijacked the discourse, and the internet’s laser beams evaporating our brains. O’Malley wields the camera like a pen—not in lockstep with Truffaut, but like a new Truffaut—with a distinct, identifiable style.
A dark figure falls into a body of water, the image is overlaid with grain, and the surface of the water looks like clouds, with the sun peeking through, calling the figure toward it. In muffled voice-over: this is a happy video, I promise. But today I woke up drowning. I found myself stuck in this empty pool and forgot how to swim.
This is Justin Kaminuma’s I Still Exist, a film poem following what appears to be the filmmaker’s life, his childhood, and regrets, photographed with superimposed images and grain. A visceral and dreamy film– with over 100,000 views in just two weeks– full of images themselves so distorted they serve as a hypnotic Rorschach test for the viewers.
A fan spins in an empty room, and Justin reminisces about how he used to watch a breeze hit the long curtains and how the fan would circle so fast it would shake. These images are layered with grain and a lo-fi aesthetic, diverting your attention from focusing on the image before you. Your mind drifts back to your own memories as a young person, flooding you with achingly bittersweet feelings.
I said this was a happy video… I lied, the muffled voice proclaims. We are hurtling through a tunnel, the lights are streaking by, orange blurs, as if we’re halfway between life and death. The voice muses about his future self writing him a letter, reassuring him that he will be happy one day. As we hear the imagined letter, a barrage of images in rapid succession attack us—images of nature, the New York skyline, the narrator’s younger self. These images zoom by so fast you barely have a moment to digest them, like the time machine the narrator yearns for, I Still Exist acts as a time machine for the viewer, awakening in us half-forgotten memories from the dusty shelves of our lives. The film ends with an image of, presumably, Justin as a little boy, smiling into a camcorder, with the title of the film, I Still Exist, across the frame.
Kaminuma’s films, albeit very different from O’Malley’s in form, share a commonality in their heavy borrowing from Internet aesthetics. Kaminuma’s work seems to be strongly shaped by nostalgia-core and liminal spaces: images and videos dedicated to nostalgic-style ambiance—such as empty classrooms, playgrounds, and childhood bedrooms set to somber music, often layered with scratching sounds to mimic a cassette tape. While O’Malley satirizes the bizarre, detached Internet world we live in, Kaminuma breathes life into it, bringing a tactility to the Internet aesthetic.
In Kaminuma’s film The Last Thing I Saw, we witness a person about to go blind, watching in nightmarish fashion as the world slips into darkness. Apples vanish, eggs disappear, entire aisles in a grocery store are swallowed by shadow. The nightmare has moments of redemption: we enter a movie theater, where a film in monochromatic blue plays—echoes of children’s laughter, swing sets, and basketball hoops submerged in blue and inverted color, creating a strange, haunting, nostalgic effect. At the end, we pass through a door into what could be a PC game from the early 2000s: green hills stretching into infinity, a perfectly blue sky, a yellow camper van parked in the green, windmills spinning, and a white house with a red roof standing in the far distance, stark against the sky.
Much like the ending of Kaminuma’s The Last Thing I Saw, there’s another internet film where we stride across endless green and into strange huts and houses. Ominous room tones hum as we wait for something to happen. Not much does; like a Béla Tarr film, but instead of the Hungarian countryside, it’s a PS1/early-2000s, low-poly nostalgia countryside. We simply explore the map, with satisfying footsteps crunching into the 480p ground. At sunset, chiptune bleeps kick in, and the sky turns pink.
This is a film by 19-year-old Kane Pixels, made in Blender and After Effects. His work has collected tens of millions of views, with his most popular film reaching a whopping 68 million. Kane gained notoriety with his enigmatic horror series Backrooms.
If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms, where it’s nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow…
Such was the caption of an unsettling picture of a renovation on 4chan, such was the genesis of the ‘Backrooms’ concept.
Kane’s iteration: A group of kids are making a film shot on an old VHS camcorder. The cameraman suddenly falls, the camera goes dark and glitches, then comes back on. We’re no longer in the driveway with his friends, but we’re in a yellow-tinged room, carpeted floors and harsh fluorescent lights. An unearthly growl sounds from within the barren office space and the cameraman finds himself chased by an unknown something. We try to outrun it, but the space is a never-ending, dizzying labyrinth, and eventually it finds us. It resembles something out of an early video game, making it all the more unnerving; dark, with wiry legs like a tripod. It slams its tentacle-like legs into us, and we fly backward, and suddenly we’re in the sky, above the clouds, plummeting towards buildings and streets below. Cut to black. This is the first installment of the Backrooms saga.
Even the dream factory has taken notice of the cyberspace avant-garde. Kane Pixels made such a ruckus that the independent film studio A24 signed him to helm a feature-length adaptation of his YouTube series, which they began filming earlier this year.
I’d be remiss to omit a veteran filmmaker who arguably blazed the trail for the online verité onslaught. In 2001, David Lynch launched DavidLynch.com, featuring exclusively released films. Among them was RABBITS, a sitcom starring a family of the eponymous creatures in a dimly lit room, who speak incoherently, with canned studio laughter erupting at random. This is just one of the many film experiments Lynch posted online. He also started his famous weather reports, providing a dose of sunny optimism in a gravelly voice. Lynch would later move to YouTube, where he continued his daily weather report and other visual experiments. It’s no coincidence that Lynch was the only one of his generation with the foresight to adapt with the changing tides. Even in his younger years, he was wholly singular; his films were not facsimiles of earlier film, and perhaps this is due to his (self-proclaimed) non-cineaste status.
These artists are just the sea spray tip of the Internet vanguard. Filmmakers like Joel Haver, a comedic jack of all trades with a wry Jarmuschian sensibility who uploads entire feature films to his two million subscribers; Schyguy, creating surreal visual poems; Jon Rafman, blending AI and animation into unnerving films; Perfect Scarecrow (plastek pet), crafting films as short as 50 seconds that resemble early 00s horror game aesthetic accompanied by dreamy ambient music; David Sandberg, making horror shorts under his banner Ponysmasher and is now also working as a film studio director (Shazam, Lights Out), all are part of this new wave—not happening as a conscious revolt, but as an organic reaction to the derivative modern-day.
If you watch many current films and shows, there seems to be a struggle with how to show modern devices: do texts pop up on the screen? Do we have tight inserts of the phone screen? Do we just have them text and then catch us up through a throwaway line? And for some reason, I can’t help but feel something’s off, like there’s a schism between “the movies” and the modern.
When I click Schyguy’s channel or O’Malley’s—these filmmakers, all diverse in style and ideas—however, the commonality is that their films all feel of the era; they feel like they’re moving at the same pace as the 2020s. They aren’t making films about films; they aren’t making films similar to films; they are capturing the world through a fresh lens, a lens molded by the last decade of rapid technological acceleration and social shifts.
Like the French New Wave before them, these filmmakers don’t shirk from reality, don’t try to escape from its harshness; rather, they lean into it, they confront it, they find meaning in the never-ending mono-yellow hellscape, the vanishing products at the grocery store, and the Yantianto conspiracy. The Internet, in a sense, has become the world’s consciousness, and theInternet New Wave is the mirror through which we can perceive it.
Tzvi is a film director from Brooklyn, New York. His debut feature film, Killer of Men, was made on a shoestring budget and met with critical acclaim. He also manages “Film Underground,” a screening series and collective that showcases lesser-known films from around the world with the hope of democratizing cinema. In his free time, he writes essays on film and short fiction.
Insta: @tzvi_shadowplayfilms
Insta: @filmunderground_
