Aaron recommends Backrooms

The opening weekend has also seen Kane Parsons become the youngest director to lead a film to #1 at global box office. Much like its titular liminal space, the cultural size of Backrooms is almost too large to parse. So, what gives? What’s hiding in the corridors of this twisty, quiet horror-drama?

In 2019, an anonymous user on 4chan published an image of an empty furniture story, hued in discomforting yellow, captioned; “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, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you.” The strange response the image invoked from viewers popularised a now common term in internet horror forums; liminal spaces. Places that you have never been to, but which still feel oddly familiar. An indoor play area with fluorescent lights? Liminal. A swimming bath, also with fluorescent lights? Liminal. And, indeed, a yellow corridor with non-descript wallpaper and, yes, fluorescent lights? Absolutely, genre-definingly liminal. It wouldn’t be until 2022 when Kane Parsons, then aged 16, uploaded the first of twenty-four videos in his YouTube series, Backrooms, inspired by the phenomena and expanding directly on that original image. With almost 200 million views across its duration, Kane’s animated project became a cornerstone of digital horror. So, when news revealed a Backrooms live-action project with Parsons himself at the helm, it’s no surprise that expectations were high.

It might seem strange to spend an introductory paragraph contextualising 4chan posts and YouTube videos, but this is a film that stands confidently on the shoulders of its own backstory. Though Parsons’ digital environments have been replaced here by (flawless) physical sets, and we’re interacting with characters and ideas which are new to the Backrooms universe, there is a marked thread tied between Parsons’ original project and this one. Most notably, like its viral predecessor, this film pushes almost nauseatingly into the power of absence. It’s not what the backrooms are; it’s what they are not. It’s not about what’s there; it’s about what’s missing. And, most importantly, it’s not about who is on-screen; it’s about who might be waiting, just around the corner, inches out of shot.

Parsons juggles the surrealist with the minimalist here in a way that will bring joy and terror to seasoned backrooms explorers and newcomers alike. It’s a decisive and sharp directorial eye which, in its best moments, brings to mind works like Lynch’s Twin Peaks and Kubrick’s The Shining. Like those projects, this is a film where the environment itself acts as a form of antagonist, thanks to the exceptional work of production designer Danny Vermette, who helped to bring Parsons’ backrooms to life over 30,000 square feet of set. The spaces here are tangible, sprawling, almost wriggling as they unfold, pushing against the characters and dictating, both literally and figuratively, the journey that the viewer is being taken on. It’s, at once, oppressive and enticing. It’s a marriage between set design and directing done so well that it makes you want to look away from dread, whilst also feeling desperate to know what’s in the next room. And it’s just convincing enough that, in the spirit of the originating 4chan post, it makes you wonder what you would do if you slipped through the cracks and ended up in the maze of mono-yellow. As we escape a 2010s era of horror movies dictated by trends, remakes, mascots and jump-scares, quiet and tense films with an original edge like Backrooms are becoming more culturally powerful than ever. Through excellent performances in Chiwetel Ejiofor’s tragic furniture shop owner Clark and Renate Reinsve’s cautious therapist Dr Mary, the film foregrounds new feelings of abandonment; of loss; of getting left behind; of getting lost. And it's those uncomfortable questions that the majority of Backrooms forces you to confront: what’s in there? Does it matter? Would it make a difference if there were nothing at all? Am I, really, just afraid of being lost?

To say literally anything else would run the risk of spoiling things, and Backrooms is absolutely a film that should be seen with as little knowledge as possible. Plus, it’s been ten years, twenty-four episodes of a YouTube series, and now a feature film, and I still couldn’t explain the backrooms to you if I tried. That’s the best part. The whole team on Backrooms would win an Oscar for curating a vibe, should such an award exist. From an absolutely cracking opening sequence to an undeniably chilling ending, Parsons and co. have created a sensory experience similar to getting to see a nightmare that you can’t quite remember being projected on the big screen. It’s fresh, it’s uncanny, it’s bold as bright yellow fluorescent lights – and it's representative of an exciting shift in the horror space, also marked by other recent successes like Obsession and Bring Her Back. More and more voices from non-traditional media are breaking out into the world of cinema, free from the furniture store and let loose in the backrooms of Hollywood, armed with a camera and an eye for the macabre. And I, for one, cannot wait to see Parsons and his peers get up to next. That is, if I can ever find my way out of this corridor…

By Aaron Cawood, LHT's Social Media and Content Officer.

You can see Backrooms at HPPH now! Find times & tickets here.