So this past weekend, my daughter Barb and I headed to the Cinema 4 theater right here in Pampa to see Backrooms, an A24 horror flick based on the liminal environmental horror story of the same name, created by YouTuber, and now film director, Kane Parsons.
Barb and I had just watched Iron Lung, (now available on YouTube to buy or rent), written and directed by beloved YouTube personality, Markiplier, so to be hit with double horror movies by these talented creators was a fantastic treat.
We sat there in anticipation with our big ‘ole bag of extra butter popcorn, trying not to eat it all before the movie started, and talked a bit about how the whole Backrooms thing got started, how they were going to pull this off in a movie format, and how great it is to see these YouTubers hit the big screen to portray their talents for the world to see, although those of us who have followed them since the beginning already knew the potential they had and hope to see more of their creations from a comfy theater seat.
You don’t have to know the story of the Backrooms to know what it is: millions of miles of empty rooms coated in sickly yellow carpet and wallpaper with the constant buzz of flourescent lights drawing you closer to insanity with each step you take in the endless maze with no exit and plenty of false ones.
First posted to 4chan’s paranormal board in 2019, the now infamous picture was uploaded without any context as to what or where this place was, and one user replied to the photo stating: “If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms, where it’s nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in. God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you.”
It didn’t take long for writers to begin sharing and uploading their own stories about the Backrooms, adding different levels, lurking creatures, and expansions to the ‘lore’, and by 2022, the subreddit r/backrooms had over 157,000 members.
But because it all started with an image, there truly was no canonical story to go with it, but in January of 2022, YouTuber Kane Parsons, known online as Kane Pixels, uploaded a VHS, found-footage style short video portraying a filmmaker who accidently ‘noclips’ (falls through) to the Backrooms and is stalked by an entity.
At just 16 years old at the time, Kane used a combination of Blender and Adobe After Effects to create one of the most popular and widely viewed depictions of the Backrooms to date, with views sitting at a staggering 78 million.
Since its original conception, the Backrooms have inspired numerous indie-developed video games and other related found footage content, and now, a full length movie by one of the best distribution companies in the horror business, A24.
But with so much content in the last few years, I wondered if it was going to be a lot of the same thing, and how could it possibly be adapted into a film without looking and feeling like the many videos that have come before it? I totally underestimated Kane Parsons.
Backed by horror-flick veteran producers such as James Wan (Insidious) and Osgood Perkins (Longlegs), the Backrooms film was written by Will Soodik and directed by Kane himself, and both the story and the vision meshed together beautifully, neither taking away from the other.
The story follows Clark, a disgruntled, failed architect turned furniture store owner who discovers a “door” within the store’s basement that leads to the massive, yellow world that seems to resemble his store (and him) in the most uncanny way.
Dragging a couple of amateur filmmakers who shot his store commercials with him into the Backrooms after his initial exploration, things take a horrific turn and it’s up to his therapist, Mary, who has her own deep-seeded trauma, to find him.
The film grossed $141 million worldwide, becoming A24’s biggest opening and box office performance to date, and making Parsons the youngest filmmaker to reach #1 at the American box office.
The movie was fantastic, and for those of us who have followed the story of the Backrooms since its conception, to see it on the big screen was like seeing it for the very first time, yet feeling the smile creep across my face as we stepped across the threshold and into the yellow with the characters.
The tension, the atmosphere, the effects, the story, and the characters, all under the direction of the young man who practically started it all, is so well done and keeps you engaged through the entire 110 minute run time. I couldn’t recommend going to see it on the big screen enough. After all, that was the point: turning a viral sensation typically viewed on a phone screen or laptop into an experience where you, the viewer, are nearly swallowed by it.
The Backrooms will be here at Cinema 4 all next week, so if you haven’t seen it yet, make plans to, and if you already have, what harm can another stroll through the infinite yellow maze do?
