The elevator pitch sounds slightly insane. Imagine a kind of parallel universe that you could accidentally fall into: an endless, seemingly randomly generated world of office building interiors, yellowing wallpaper, and buzzing fluorescent lights. The ‘architecture’, as it were, grows more bizarre and disjointed the deeper you go, and there seems to be something living down there, hungry for human flesh…
To some audience members, this might sound like another day in Kirchberg. But Kane Parsons’ Backrooms – now A24 highest grossing film ever – is very much a product of internet-based youth culture. Touching on recent cultural obsessions with liminality and retro aesthetics, it proves two things: that the horror film franchise is a thing of the past, and that all mainstream culture is downstream from anyonymous online message boards.
The film follows certified sad sack Clark who runs a failing furniture store. A recent divorcé, he frequently attends therapy sessions with Mary and maybe drinks a little bit too much. One night, he noticed an uncanny crack in the store’s basement. It’s a completely invisible portal to the Backrooms, and Clark soon becomes obsessed.
He explores the eerie hallways, finds secret passages, notices how out of joint the whole place is. The Backrooms are like some demented god’s memory of life on Earth: hallways that lead to nowhere, doors that are too big/small, malformed lamps and couches and stop signs scattered ad hoc throughout.
Clark employs a young couple, Kat and Bobby, to explore and document the Backrooms’ layout. But in their expedition, they discover that the Backrooms aren’t entirely uninhabited. Something snatches Bobby and Kat, and Clark seemingly disappears into the infinite labyrinth.
A cryptic message on Mary’s answering machine prompts her to go looking for Clark. She discovers the Backrooms – and the uncanny entities therein.
Chronically online audience members will find this stuff riveting. The Backrooms have been a part of internet lore ever since it first appeared as a 4chan post in 2019. It touches on the uncanniness of liminal spaces, retro aesthetics, the mystery of creepypasta – looks and feels that the internet at large just loves.
The film has been a breakthrough success, despite being a ‘niche’ horror film, despite not being a part of a horror franchise, despite director Kane Parsons being twenty years old at the time of filming.
if anything, the few creative decisions that take away from the film seem to stem from outside influences. Whilst Parsons directed, for example, he has previously mentioned receiving a lot of support and advice. The script for Backrooms, too, was written by the seasonsed screenwriter Will Soodik.
Backrooms, starting as rumination on loneliness, isolation, and a feeling of lostness, seems a little too eager to convert into a creature feature. The horror of the Backrooms is its endlessness, its delerious monotony.
But none of the characters get properly lost in them, never step back and consider the true scale, the true implication, the true horror of that place – because they’re too busy getting chased by twisted, screaming monsters.
It’s a minor detail, but one that feels like a studio intervention that actively works against the core concept. Kane Parsons’ original Youtube series was certainly more emphatic in this aspect, to truly horrifying effect:
Backrooms truly works as a breath of fresh air for the industry. But it seems as if Hollywood (yes, A24 is very much a part of Hollywood) isn’t quite ready yet to let these fresh ideas fully breath. Backrooms reverts to more familiar, more stable narrative beats and creature feature stylings as it goes on – meaning we’ve yet to see a truly novel, internet-borne horror that keeps the chronically online up at night.
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