7.1/10 IMDb 88% Rotten Tomatoes
Kane Parsons, the 20-year-old American YouTuber-turned director of the new A24 film Backrooms, is a hot topic in the cinema world. And for good reason.
Backrooms is an unsettling, unnerving watch that has you looking around corners for the next jump scare. The film follows Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) as he deals with a messy breakup and a soul-crushing job that doesn’t reflect his passion for architecture. The parallels between Clark’s love for architecture and the frankly topsy-turvy world of the ‘backrooms’ create an almost perfect harmony in world-building. But things start to go wrong as Clark and the others he brings into the ‘backrooms’, including his therapist, realise they’re not alone.
There were parts of Backrooms that encouraged sweaty palms, but none more so than the sections filmed entirely on camcorder footage. For anyone who was terrified by the 1999 film The Blair Witch Project, this may bring up bad memories, as there is something about watching grainy footage – in which you cannot see the full picture- that is scarier than the horror itself.
But if you’re unfamiliar with the concept of the ‘backrooms’, you’re not alone. It’s often a word thrown around, similar to ‘liminal spaces’ or ‘uncanny valley’ locations, but it basically means somewhere that feels surreal or menacing. The origins of the ‘backrooms’ are actually much more concrete, and can be traced back to a creepypasta on 4chan in 2019. Again, we wouldn’t blame you for not knowing what either of those things is.
4chan, which has been around for over 20 years, is an imageboard website where anyone can post comments and share images, and the original image of the so-called ‘backrooms’ started here as a creepypasta. Now, a creepypasta is a short horror story, or legend shared across the internet, usually one that is copied and pasted by a range of users. And this is how the ‘backrooms’ started on 4chan, with a yellow-toned, liminal space-looking picture with a vaguely unsettling story attached.
When comparing the original picture to Parsons’ Backrooms set, it is pretty much spot on. The film, however, dives deeper into the lore behind the ‘backrooms’, and you end up losing count of how many different rooms, corridors and frighteningly odd-looking spaces you see. We only see a majority of the rooms once, each one a slightly different configuration from the ones that came before, but throughout the film, they get slightly darker – in both senses of the word.
Backrooms had every possibility to be a complete mess of jumpscares and no plot, but instead, it prevailed in every aspect. It keeps you on the edge of your seat, and it has you wondering how Clark remembered the layout of all of those rooms. More importantly, you become invested in Clark’s personality and how it has bled into the mindbending world that is the ‘backrooms’. Overall, Backrooms is a horror worth a second watch, and we think that is pretty high praise.
Featured image: A24
Images included: The original photo posted on 4chan and A24 poster