This opening paragraph is for the oldsters. Specifically, for people my age who have other (and I can only hope, better) things to do than keep up with the subject at hand. I’m talking about “creepypasta,” an online term that describes horror content created for the Internet. It primarily refers to urban legends such as The Slender Man, though it takes in anything from YouTube horror videos to traditional short stories that are posted online. The word comes from “copypasta,” which are blocks of text that go viral from being copied and pasted repeatedly.
It’s only logical that movies would take inspiration from creepypasta, such as Sylvain White’s Slender Man and Jane Schoenbrun’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair. The latest and most successful example is Kane Parsons’ Backrooms. Its unusual nature presents a challenge for me as a reviewer. Well, I like a challenge.
The online myth of the backrooms originated on 4chan in the early 2010s, when users started posting stories about a liminal space tangential to our reality that consisted of endless labyrinths of rooms lit by fluorescent lights and sparsely decorated with yellow walls and carpets. A few years ago, then-teenage YouTube creator Parsons (or Kane Pixels, which is his handle) made a series of videos depicting a man with a camera getting lost in the backrooms and finding scary monsters roaming the halls. Parsons is now 21, and in adapting his visions to the big screen, he showcases considerable talent to back up his unique voice.
The story is set in 1990, and Chiwetel Ejiofor portrays Clark, the angry, alcoholic owner of a furniture store in San Jose that already looks like its own circle of hell before we find out that Clark lives there after the breakup of his marriage. He’s happy, then, to find a fake wall in the store’s basement that leads directly into the rooms. He shows them to his employees (Finn Roberts and Lukita Maxwell), but whatever’s lurking in there ends up dragging them both to a bloody death. We don’t actually see the thing until late in the film.
The production design in this movie is killer. Danny Vermette served in that capacity on several of Osgood Perkins’ films, including Longlegs, and his work here is even more spectacular. He gives us furniture that’s sinking into the floor or being absorbed into the walls as well as doors that open up three feet above the floor and force people to either climb up or jump down when using them. Just like they were described in the 4chan thread, the interiors here indicate human presence while giving the sense that the humans are long gone, like one of Giorgio de Chirico’s paintings in cinematic form. The tempting comparison is to Stanley Kubrick, who infused the hallways of the Overlook Hotel with such dread in The Shining. I think the better comparison might be Christopher Nolan, whose Inception and Interstellar both dealt with spaces folding in on themselves and impossible architecture.
A fair amount of this film is shot by the characters holding 1980s-vintage video cameras, thus imitating the grainy VHS look of Parsons’ original videos and home movies from that time. You wouldn’t necessarily be surprised to find someone in these rooms facing the corner like at the end of The Blair Witch Project, but this film manages a memorable riff on the found-footage horror genre by having Clark put down his camera so that we can see him trying to save one of his employees. That’s when someone or something picks up the camera and starts approaching him with it.
You’ll be glad to know that the film has more than just a clever gimmick, as the backrooms turn out to be a reflection of Clark’s warped mind. He’s a frustrated architect, and thus is able to draw detailed maps of the rooms. The monster that’s haunting his hallways is not only frightening in itself when we finally see it. It also embodies the madness that eventually eats him, as his psychotherapist (Renate Reinsve) unearths it as well as facing her own childhood trauma when she ventures into the rooms.
This past weekend, Backrooms and Obsession finished 1-2 atop the box office, causing a bunch of my fellow film freaks to buzz about how their directors (both YouTube creators whose 30th birthdays are some distance in the future) slayed the big-ticket monsters of The Devil Wears Prada 2 and Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu. It’s a neat story, but I think it’s more of a coincidence than anything else. Their films don’t have that much in common; Obsession is a far more traditional piece of work as well as a scarier horror movie, for my money. Their joint success may lead Hollywood to sign up other millennial YouTube auteurs, but we’ve already seen how that background is no guarantee of good filmmaking. Markiplier’s Iron Lung came out on a bunch of screens this past winter to mixed reviews. (I didn’t care for it, but it was a slick move to release the film himself and take the lion’s share of the profits. Well played, Markiplier.)
Whatever impact it has on cinema’s future, right now you can just appreciate Backrooms for its freshness. It’s one thing to make a good horror flick, and quite another to make a whole other kind of horror that we haven’t seen before. That novelty is why the crowds have flocked to this yellow-tinted box of insanity. I’m glad they saw something worth talking about.
Backrooms
Starring Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve. Directed by Kane Parsons. Written by Will Soodik, based on Parsons’ video series. Rated R.
