We are truly in a horror renaissance. Horror films, led by indie distributors like A24, Blumhouse, and NEON, are simultaneously critically acclaimed, excellent in quality, and popular at the box office. Backrooms, from YouTube short film sensation Kane Parsons, has gained A24 the largest opening in its history. This is an even more impressive feat when you consider the fact that the film went up against The Mandalorian and Grogu, and thoroughly took Star Wars to the cleaners.
Backrooms is a feature-film adaptation of Parsons’ internet shorts, which are themselves adaptations of creepypasta, or scary stories copied and pasted around the net in its earlier days. The film stars Chiwetel Ejiofor as Clark, a frustrated, divorced furniture salesman who once wanted to be an architect (living in his showroom and watching Santa Claus Conquers the Martians), and Renate Reinsve as Mary, his therapist with her own traumatic past. On the surface, at least, Backrooms seems to be about an enormous, pale-yellow office maze with an invisible entryway in Clark’s furniture store basement. The Backrooms seem to go on forever and extend in three dimensions, and the décor in each room is often half in, half out of the floor or repeated in unsettling ways. There are speakers blaring the Voyager space record greetings in many languages, a corporation watching them via cameras, and an unusual monster stalking everyone.
That’s what it seems to be about. What Backrooms is really about is confronting trauma, taking responsibility for past behavior, and learning if it’s OK to be alone when the state of being alone is self-inflicted. As Mary says in the opening voiceover: “It’s the neural pathway of least resistance. A path you made. It’s the one that kept you safe when you were a child. You learned to push people away before they could hurt you. And now, as an adult, you’re still stuck right where you started. Alone.” Parsons tells this allegorical story through repeated forays into the Backrooms, which forces the spelunkers to confront their traumas in dreamlike ways that never end well. In the end, as a small piece of the nature of the Backrooms (and who is studying them) is revealed, the movie picks up the pace and ramps up the surreality, creepiness, and sudden bloody violence, impressively channeling Kubrick’s The Shining or perhaps something from David Lynch’s oeuvre.
The whole movie, in fact, feels like one of those dreams that’s not quite pleasant and not quite a nightmare, but is so completely fucked up that you struggle to make any sense of it once you awake; one of those dreams that bothers you the rest of the day as waking life somehow keeps reminding you of the messed-up nature of the dream world. Whereas another recent A24 horror triumph, Undertone, managed to thoroughly creep out audiences through its sound, in the case of Backrooms—though the sound design is fantastic—it’s the unbelievably bothersome visuals that carry the film in original and surprising ways. Elevated horror? In this case it’s more like descended horror. Bring plenty of rope.
