It all started with an old photograph taken in 2003 of an old furniture store (that currently no longer exists) which was under renovation at the time in Wisconsin. The photograph depicted a series of empty rooms with yellow walls and floors, an early precursor to what we would nowadays call a liminal space, giving this unnerving sense of feeling that something is not quite right with the emptiness and openness of the space in particular. It was not until the 2010s, however, when an anonymous user on 4chan tells a story of the Backrooms complete with that particular photograph attached, beginning a new online phenomena that would only continue to grow from there. You can also attribute part of this growth to director Kane Parsons himself, who in 2022 began uploading his own videos of the Backrooms that were done using tools like Blender and Adobe After Effects. His first video became an instant viral success, spawning an entire online series of videos, which culminated in Parsons getting a deal with A24 to make a feature-length film on the Backrooms, becoming the youngest filmmaker ever under A24 at just 20 years old, as the marketing for this movie will tell you.

The very idea of a film based entirely on an online creepypasta isn’t entirely new – some folks may (or may not) remember the Slender Man film back in 2018 that came years past the sell-by date of the urban legend itself and went. We live in an era where the young generation of filmmakers who grew up on the Internet, who are also content creators on social media platforms like YouTube are now the rising new filmmaking talent and voices, as seen with Curry Barker’s Obsession and the RackaRacka twins with their two features Talk to Me and Bring Her Back. Many articles have been written as of late about how this new Gen Z group of filmmakers are ‘saving’ horror in an era where the horror genre is at its most prolific and far from needing to be saved in any way. But something that is clear is the access of different mediums of artistic expression that they can draw their own creative influence from – Parsons himself has stated that he owes a great deal to the Portal video games. The games play around with liminal-like spaces, marked with drawings all over the walls showing that there were once people who were there before our protagonist Chell, plus the entire setting is a run-down research laboratory. The Backrooms seem to operate on similar principles – the reveal of the origins of the Backrooms later on in the film feels like a nod to that particular setting of the Portal franchise. But also with the success of Backrooms already posting the highest opening weekend numbers for Friday alone, there’s going to be a lot of incentive to explore other creepypasta ideas to translate directly to film as well – time will tell how any of those projects will transpire.

Even at such a young age, Kane Parsons shows good command of the cinematic language – he knows how to exert patience and the importance of slow tension build-up with the very effective found-footage opening sequence that admittedly made me jump upon the encounter with the Entity inside. The found footage portions are quite well-done and are the most effective parts of the film for me – probably because these are the sequences that do not fall to certain shortcomings that you might expect from a first-time filmmaker of that age, and they are most representative of the videos that Parsons had established his name on from the beginning. Where I think the film starts to become less effective is in the sequences that exist outside of the Backrooms themselves – we transition from that excellent opening sequence inside the Backrooms to a therapy session involving our protagonist Clark and therapist Mary. The movie really over-explains Clark’s struggles as a guy deteriorating in the face of his separation from his wife and family, who feels isolated (much like Mary herself in a way) and is a chronic alcoholic. This exposition dump actually kills any suspense of the initial reveal of the Backrooms later on, when we were already introduced to it at the beginning plus it’s not hard to see how the Backrooms simply serves as a reflection of Clark’s own mental state. Even more so when Mary later on discovers the Backrooms herself in her search for Clark – big loud suspenseful music plays to indicate something scary will happen or to anticipate something surprising, but we already know by this point what the first room looks like through Clark’s perspective. Not very suspenseful, isn’t it? (Perhaps Mary should also be calling the police first to investigate rather than wander into there herself, but a trope like that that might be the lesser of the film’s problems in this case.)

The portion of the film involving Mary’s journey and exploration into the Backrooms also suffers from similar problems as the climax involves Mary bashing the head of a giant demented pirate version of Clark in the Backrooms while the real Clark could not even overpower him. Ditto the appearance of Phil explaining the origins of the Backrooms via the backstory of the former MRI company concentrating their efforts into researching the Backrooms, which admittedly only serves to keep the Backrooms ambiguous rather than definitive in its meaning and themes. There’s clearly a ploy here to set-up a future instalment in this series – which will most likely happen, but makes me wonder if even those future instalments will only continue to serve the ambiguity rather than commit to any one interpretation – a reflection of the current economic decline and downfall of America via the furniture store (especially with the shots of endless suburbia that only reminds me of David Lynch’s own skepticism of the American Dream), or AI-as-memory and both their distortion and degradation. Still, I like to look at how good a film is by judging the beginning and whether or not the final shot is a memorable one – and in this case, both are true. Even in its ineffective moments, it’s hard not to be drawn by the whole concept and notion of the Backrooms to begin with, as well as what Kane Parsons has in store for the many years to come.