SANDY BACKROOMS
If the word “backroom” brings back fond memories of nights with friends, and “liminal” evokes nothing more than a decent Scrabble move, and you’re wondering whether you can order “creepypasta” at a restaurant, don’t worry. You’re probably just a little old, and that happens to plenty of decent people. It’s at least what the author of these lines repeats to himself every morning.
The dark origin story of the film Backrooms was born on the internet in the 2010s, with a simple photo of empty, dreary, yellowed offices, resurfacing in 2019 on 4chan in a discussion about subtly unsettling images, with a post that lit the fuse:
“If you don’t pay attention and you slip out of reality via a ‘noclip’ into the wrong places, you’ll end up in the Backrooms, where there is nothing but the nauseating smell of damp carpet, the madness of a uniform yellow, the background hum of buzzing neon at full blast, and roughly six hundred million square kilometers of randomly segmented empty rooms in which you’ll be trapped. God help you if you hear something lurking nearby, because that thing is sure to have heard you.”
Seven years later, the term “Backrooms” designates an unbelievable labyrinth of discussions and creations, with countless variations, theories, stories, and even video games. And at the center of this universe stand the short films directed by Kane Parsons, aka Kane Pixels, a clever 16-year-old who helped popularize these labyrinths as early as 2022, in the process spawning a mythology worthy of X-Files.
The culmination of this miracle: he was snapped up by Hollywood to direct his first film from all of this, with a budget of $10 million and the support of A24 (Everything Everywhere All at Once, Hereditary) and Atomic Monster (founded by James Wan, director of Saw, Insidious and the like), with the goal of finally propelling this phenomenon into the real world.
NEON DEMON
The concise historical recap is amusing but absolutely not essential to jump headfirst into the jaw of the beast. That, in fact, is Backrooms’ greatest strength: the nightmare’s core is so simple, so pure, that everyone will instantly recognize their own entry point, as if it were the lobby for all nightmares. It’s a place of paradoxes that feels incredibly small, where endless hallways are crushed by low ceilings, and where vast open spaces quickly become suffocating. By reshaping and warping the most dreary elements of daily life—neon, chairs, and carpets—they become markers of a disquiet that is more awkward than it is terrifying because it’s absurd.
Backrooms isn’t at its best when it tries to do more than lean on the obvious strength of this labyrinth. When it pays homage to the grisly found footage videos that made it famous, when it tracks its characters’ first steps beyond reality, and when it follows their sprint to safety, Kane Parsons manages to capture, even in fleeting moments, the vertigo of this almost existential maze. The most striking scenes are often the quietest, the smallest doors proving to be the most frightening. As a 2.0 take on uncanny dread, Backrooms ultimately requires only silence and time to work. The catch is you still have to fill 1 hour and 50 minutes, since it’s a feature film.
ALONE TWO
The screenplay by Will Soodik (Ash vs Evil Dead, Westworld) actually starts with a solid premise. By taking two sad characters bound by a professional relation rather than a personal one, the opposite of the usual horror-film couples, Backrooms immediately presents a world of solitude. The sickly corridors of the other world are grotesque reflections of the TV trays in front of a television, so the way the two characters drift toward each other feels almost painfully natural. And do they deserve it? And do they want it, somewhere deep down? And could that be one of the diabolical keys to this hell?
During the first act, the economy of dialogue lands hard and creates a disquiet that is already far too evident for a world normal, washed in the faded 90s color palette. But the movie trips over the carpet when it must pull everyone together and make sense of this mess. Clark, Mary, and the backrooms each work well enough on their own, when they observe one another in silence. They work a lot less well when they start clashing, beginning with a dining-scene where the writer’s hand, not as clever as he believes, becomes too heavy on dialogue and on symbolic flourishes.
OPEN SPACE OPERA
By finally giving a face to the thing that haunts these corridors, Backrooms ran the risk of falling into the classic horror trap — diminishing, or killing, the imagination. By giving it that face, and showing it so well, so long, and so simply, the effect becomes all the more terrifying. Once it becomes a straightforward chase between a monster and a potential victim, the film loses almost all of its strange charm. When the sight of an enormous, empty, absurd set becomes more terrifying than the monster breaking down the door to enter, there might be a problem with the equation. The more the film tries to mean something, the more it seems to lose sensation.
Backrooms somehow lands back on its feet surprisingly at the very end. After a confrontation that’s roughly as interesting as a sub-Insidious installment, this universe remains stubbornly open. By letting its characters wander, crushed by their own insignificance and overwhelmed by the prospect of a world that grows by evading logic, Kane Parsons returns to what really matters: the endless horizon of this incomprehensible horror that seeps into reality. The film was just a tiny door cracked open, and the final, brilliant shot brings together all the faces of this vertiginous nightmare.
Still, one question remains: are the film’s strongest aspects mainly the work of Kane Parsons, or are they simply inherited from these “backrooms” that he didn’t create, as he’s always claimed? In any case, it’s him who remains the clever kid at the center of the story. And since Backrooms, despite its limitations, sidestepped becoming the kind of low-budget horror production with the personality of yellowed wallpaper, that’s a good sign.
