Backrooms review: Does the online creepypasta make a good full-length movie?
Horror is ushering in a new breed of filmmakers.
All across the genre, online creators are making the jump from YouTube to the big screen. Danny and Michael Philippou (aka Rackaracka) did it with Talk To Me and Bring Her Back, and Curry Barker is currently doing it with Obsession. Now, 20-year-old Backrooms director Kane Parsons joins their ranks.
The young creator found fame on YouTube with his series of short films inspired by the Backrooms creepypasta born out of an old 4Chan post. His videos amassed tens of millions of views and a loyal fanbase. The question is: has Parsons, with co-writer Will Soodik, managed to make the challenging jump from short-form content to full-length A24 feature?
The answer is yes. But there is a caveat.
What's Backrooms about?
Set in Santa Clara Valley, California in the '90s, Backrooms hinges on wannabe-architect turned furniture store owner Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor). He's in a bad place, spending his days drinking and processing his recent separation with his therapist Mary (Renate Reinsve). But one night, while using his store as temporary accomodation, a flickering basement light leads him to the discovery of a hidden doorway, and a seemingly never-ending series of rooms.
The space beyond the door is the titular Backrooms, filled with faulty yellow lights, barely furnished rooms that oscillate between cavernous and claustrophobic, and strange distant noises that suggest the place may not be entirely empty.
Sound creepy? It is. Production designer Danny Vermette, art director Alan Derksen, and set decorator Trevor Johnston have done an amazing job at creating a world that feels both familiar and uncanny — and draws direct aesthetic inspiration from the creepypasta. Parsons, who also designed the lighting, uses this liminal space as his own nightmarish playground.
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Backrooms feels like a new horror subgenre
Plenty of horror films explore creepy hidden worlds (see Insidious, Get Out, and Annihilation), and characters trapped in unusual spaces is something that's been done before too (see Exit 8, Cube, even Severance). But Backrooms feels like its own "liminal horror" beast. It's an M.C. Escher-inspired realm that plays on the uneasiness of seeing everyday objects slightly distorted: furniture stacked in a jumble in the centre of the floor; a tunnel halfway up the wall; corridors that go on and on and on. As the characters move through this space, composer Edo Van Breemen and Parsons' soundtrack is oppressive, while sound editor Eugenio Battaglia keeps your nerves on edge with ominous background rumbling and the whiny mosquito buzz of fluorescents.
Parsons' direction adds to this unique hellscape. His short films utilise found footage to complement the grainy mystery of the Backrooms, and his feature pays homage to this with a sequence in the second act that sees director of photography Jeremy Cox employing a handheld POV camera to horrifying effect. This is where the film is at its best, with Clark and two of his employees (Lukita Maxwell and Finn Bennett) dashing through a labyrinth of disjointed rooms. You don't know exactly what they're running from, or where they are, and the sequence is horror film-making at its finest.
Does Backrooms have any weaknesses?
The second act is, unfortunately, Backrooms at its peak. Act three doesn't quite deliver on the promise made by the film's first two thirds. Is it bad? Not at all. The final third hints at the answers to some of the film's bigger questions while also holding things back. It's still tense and scary.
But it's not quite as effective as what came before, and the main reason for that is that we finally see what the characters are running from. Like many horror films, seeing the monster inevitably removes some of the tension.
Despite this, Backrooms is still well worth a watch. The ending isn't enough to spoil what came before.
If anything, Parsons has managed to prove himself as an incredibly talented emerging filmmaker while also establishing the first chapter in what will surely end up becoming a brand new horror franchise.
