Backrooms Analysis: Empty like an abandoned store

From internet forums to YouTube, and from YouTube to the big screen, Backrooms arrives in theaters as the latest feature film distributed by A24. Directed by Kane Parsons and written by Will Soodik, the movie is based on Creepypastas, a long-standing internet tradition of horror stories that circulated through forums and were retold hundreds of times by different users.

Backrooms hits theaters at a significant moment when mainstream horror movies no longer experiment as much as they did in the previous generation. Everything feels like a massive formula designed to be repeated over and over, and honestly, nobody wants to see a generic, nonsensical monster jump scare on the screen for the millionth time.

Emanating a found-footage aesthetic and bringing new talent to the director's chair, the film arrives with the promise of presenting something fresh. But can it actually deliver on what it proposes?

What follows is a spoiler-free review of Backrooms. You can safely explore this room because you will find no surprises here.

For anyone who spent the last decade away from the internet, the Backrooms were born in May 2019 from a photo posted on 4chan. It showed an empty room with yellowish walls, damp carpet, and buzzing fluorescent lights, accompanied by the promise that if you had the misfortune of glitching out of reality in the wrong place ("noclip" in video game jargon), you would end up there. We are talking about six hundred million square kilometers of identical rooms and no exit. The cruelest detail is that it took five years to discover that the photo was just an abandoned furniture store in Oshkosh, deep in the United States. In the end, Nietzsche's abyss was simply a sofa clearance sale.

From that point on, the internet did what the internet does best: it turned a poorly lit hallway into a religion. Collaborative wikis emerged, cataloging hundreds of levels, each with its own rules and dangers, alongside a bestiary of entities documented with the rigor of someone filing a tax return for a place that does not even exist. Some people learned Blender from scratch just to render their own yellow nightmare, and typing "Backrooms" into YouTube today returns a bottomless pit of homemade found footage, video essays, and even ambient soundtracks to relax to in the abyss.

In the middle of this mix appeared Kane Parsons, known as Kane Pixels, who in January 2022, at just sixteen years old, posted a short film called The Backrooms (Found Footage). The video racked up nearly eighty million views on its own, spawning a series of more than twenty episodes complete with a shadow corporation called Async, which tries to open a door to the other side with the exact results you would expect. Altogether, the series surpassed one hundred and ninety million views. In short, while you were finishing high school, this kid built a mythology with nearly two hundred million views and signed a contract with A24.

The movie tells the story of Clark, a failed, recently divorced architect who seeks to get his life back on track through therapy. Unfortunately, Clark is not very open to change and proves to be quite resistant to anything outside his personal convictions.

Everything changes when the man accidentally stumbles upon an entrance to the Backrooms. He explores the place, starts trying to understand how it works, and attempts to prove to people that it is real in a progressively obsessive manner.

It is undeniable that the plot carries a great deal of interest when it sets out to explore this universe of the Backrooms. The genre device here is planted in a different way, playing with mystery and curiosity. What these characters represent quickly becomes crystal clear because it is not their complexity that matters, it is the exploration of a mythology being created right in front of us.

Unfortunately, the disappointment comes precisely from the desire to defend a thesis without ever explaining it.

Imagine that I desperately need you to believe that eating avocados is good. However, I cannot tell you any of its benefits, where the avocado comes from, or why it tastes good. This is exactly what the feature film does with the Backrooms. It is understandable that there is a desire to create mystery, even to turn the film into a franchise and consolidate intellectual property. But it is deeply frustrating when absolutely no answers are given, making everything you just watched seem entirely purposeless.

The other layer of disappointment lies in the direction of the film. Kane Parsons, unburdened by the bad habits of the industry, hinted that he wanted to and could propose new things, bring back found footage, and play with a more purposeful direction offering greater creative freedom. Unfortunately, none of that translates to the screen. The film does have a few distinct moments, but for 95% of the plot, we just see another prominent talent being captured by the voracious grinder of the pasteurized horror movie industry.

A debut feature is always a difficult hurdle for a first-time director, so it is still possible to spot a lack of maturity, excessive repetition, and poor pacing control on Parsons' part. This makes it hard to immerse oneself in the movie and enjoy the experience without feeling repeatedly cheated at the expense of any explanation or foundation regarding the object of terror.

Without any explanation on the matter, the terror becomes a metaphor for nothing, explains nothing, and justifies nothing, not even itself.

Backrooms is not an incredible movie, far from it. But it attempts to be something better than it actually is. In the future, a sequel with more freedom or directed by someone more experienced might live up to the expectations built around the film. Unfortunately, that day is not today, and we must evaluate the movie solely for what it is: the hollow ghost of what could have been.

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

And what about you, what did you think of Backrooms? Did you go look everything up on YouTube afterward? Were you also frustrated by the absence of any real answers?

As for us, we will wait for the third movie, since we estimate that an actual answer will only come around that time.

See you next time!