Kane Parsons
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This feature—like Blair Witch Project, Chronicle, and Cloverfield before it—makes an evocative case for the genre…
Like the aforementioned Creep or The Blair Witch Project — both of which evidently haunt Parsons’ search history — Backrooms is terrifying at face value, especially when framed as faceless found footage…
…it’s something like The Blair Witch Project spliced with Cube blended with Synecdoche, New York, mostly shot in liminal spaces lit in queasy mono-yellow.
Much of the film thrives on its atmosphere, leaning into a lo-fi, analog horror aesthetic that clearly draws inspiration from early found footage staples like “The Blair Witch Project” and “Paranormal Activity,” while filtering those influences through the sensibilities of the creepypasta generation.
It feels like a mild rip off of “The Blair Witch Project” (1999) without the follow up frenzy?
…first person perspective is reminiscent of The Blair Witch Project…
(Perhaps The Shining is ground zero for this subgenre?)
You know, spaces that exist outside their usual context, like school hallways, closed shopping malls or the Overlook Hotel in “The Shining,” spaces usually buzzing with activity but now devoid of people and sparking a surreal feeling of dread and dislocation.
While there are scenes which draw on and resemble iconic moments in The Shining and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre…
It’s like The Twilight Zone meets The Shining meets Blue Velvet meets Twin Peaks meets Severance meets Blair Witch Project meets The Silence of the Lambs…
“Backrooms” feels like a mash up of “Identity” (2003) meets “The Shining” (1980) meets “Smile” (2022) meets Mark Z. Danielewski’s 2000 novel, “House of Leaves,” meets “Alice in Wonderland” meets “Lost,”…
What he discovers is a seemingly endless maze that makes the Overlook Hotel look like a roadside motel. (Twice Parsons directly nods to The Shining, which shares Backrooms’ corridors-as-neural-pathways metaphor.)
I’m thinking of the dream logic of David Lynch with “Eraserhead” and Charlie Kaufman with “Synecdoche, New York.”
Backrooms is one of the most out there art-horror features since Eraserhead.
Backrooms brought me back to the first floor of the Carmel Clay Public Library, where I met this site’s co-founder and my lifelong friend, Evan Dossey, nearly 20 years ago. I was holding a DVD copy of Eraserhead when I looked up to find Evan’s eyes sparkling as they peered through the stacks. “That’s a great movie,” he said with anticipation, as if eagerly waiting to watch me enter another dimension.
Backrooms has been linked with the likes of Exit 8, Skinamarink, and We’re All Going to the World’s Fair as examples of Internet-inspired, liminal-space horror…
Kyle Edward Ball’s Skinamarink has proven a harbinger of the 2020s horror cinema scene…
At one end of the spectrum lies the story-absent Skinamarink while the other champions the absurdist Being John Malkovich, each leaning into their own brands of madness experiencing in-between spaces.
A movie like Skinamarink didn’t work for me because I needed more of an actual plot.
Like "Skinamarink" before it, "Backrooms" may not entirely live up to the impossible hype surrounding it for everyone.
…where my Skinamarink heads at?!?
Curry Barker’s Obsession is presently setting box office records, single-handedly ushering in this changing of the guard.
Curry Barker’s excellent Obsession exploded this aesthetic into the mainstream only a few weeks ago…
Like Curry Barker, the 26-year-old behind the box-office phenomenon Obsession, and Danny and Michael Philippou, the brothers behind Australian breakout Talk to Me, Backrooms director Kane Parsons is a creature of the internet.
Completes a trilogy of sorts of YouTube content creators pivoting to massively successful feature filmmaking. Backrooms success, like that of Obsession and Iron Lung before it, represents something significant in the modern history of cinema.
…not every reviewer is as sure you’ll be as “obsessed” with The Backrooms as you may have been with the recent Obsession release…
Curry Barker’s brutal black comedy Obsession…
Gen Z, the first audience whose primary gateway horrors were found in the dark expanses of the internet rather than the confines of the big screen, has been catered to in the last decade by such films as Slender Man and Five Nights at Freddy’s.
One might say his take on the creepypasta has the same demo as the Five Nights at Freddy’s crowd.
Backrooms feels like a link between the literal 80’s retro horror of Five Nights at Freddy’s and the endlessly surreal office space of Severance…
No one would look at The Blob and call it “elevated horror,” but it’s arguably making more of a statement than Backrooms.
…after a particularly The Texas Chain Saw Massacre-reminiscent scene between Clark and Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve)…
…a DALL-E text-to-image AI-generated version of the dinner table climax from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre…
I’m thinking of the dream logic of David Lynch with “Eraserhead” and Charlie Kaufman with “Synecdoche, New York.”
…it’s something like The Blair Witch Project spliced with Cube blended with Synecdoche, New York, mostly shot in liminal spaces lit in queasy mono-yellow.
The unnerving tone of the short films in the series successfully established a sense of world building, even if his approach borrowed heavily from Lost and other sci-fi works…
“Backrooms” feels like a mash up of “Identity” (2003) meets “The Shining” (1980) meets “Smile” (2022) meets Mark Z. Danielewski’s 2000 novel, “House of Leaves,” meets “Alice in Wonderland” meets “Lost,”…
Gen Z, the first audience whose primary gateway horrors were found in the dark expanses of the internet rather than the confines of the big screen, has been catered to in the last decade by such films as Slender Man and Five Nights at Freddy’s.
Like Slender Man, the Backrooms spontaneously generated on message boards and forums, growing from a 4Chan thread to a whole fandom built on images and posts in what was effectively a group writing exercise.
Even including something like Stranger Things, what with Async channeling the Hawkins Lab researchers, complete with monitoring an alternate dimension/portal to another world called the Upside Down, itself a sinister foil for the “real world” Hawkins.
Some of the beats resemble the final season of Netflix’s “Stranger Things” while avoiding the maliciousness of 1408 (these rooms aren’t evil; they just are).
…like the ID monster of Altair IV in Forbidden Planet, the Backrooms offer a cathartic environment that lets loose inner demons.
It’s like The Twilight Zone meets The Shining meets Blue Velvet meets Twin Peaks meets Severance meets Blair Witch Project meets The Silence of the Lambs…
The design feels reminiscent of unhinged choices like the stop-motion rabbit monster from Dante’s segment in the 1983 Twilight Zone film…
It’s like The Twilight Zone meets The Shining meets Blue Velvet meets Twin Peaks meets Severance meets Blair Witch Project meets The Silence of the Lambs…
Much like The Great Mouse Detective heralded the imminent arrival of the Disney Renaissance…
…all of what Peter McCallister (John Heard) appeared to have in Home Alone, a primary 90s movie that Gen Z homes in on mostly for how incredulous they are that someone could afford to live in a house like that…
…a bit of X-Files hazmat-and-flashlights people to study this paranormal activity…
…toss into a blender a number of 90s movies—ranging from The Truman Show to The Matrix to The Blair Witch Project…