“Backrooms” is one of several dozen horror films slated for local cineplexes in the upcoming months. It received quite a bit of attention, with its impressive $76 million opening weekend. By June 7, “Backrooms” had gone on to earn over $212 million worldwide.
The film is the work of A24’s youngest director (just 20 years old), the self-taught filmmaker, visual effects prodigy and wildly successful YouTube creator, Kane Parsons.
“Backrooms” falls into the categories of Found Footage Horror, Psychological Horror and Supernatural Horror just to name a few. It is an ambitious project that deliberately avoids many of the formula elements that define so many stock horror movies.
Instead, as with the Robert Wise classic “The Haunting” (1963), it relies heavily on scary atmosphere. Also, much like Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining” (1980), it transforms a nonthreatening environment into a hell hole of sheer terror. In “The Shining,” it was a beautiful but isolated resort hotel. In “Backrooms,” it’s your average local discount furniture store.
The main characters in “Backrooms” are the furniture store owner, Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and his shrink Mary (Renate Reinsve). He is a troubled, angry man struggling to recover from an ugly divorce. The pressure has taken its toll, emotionally and psychologically.
One night Clark, who sleeps in a display bed in the basement of the store, notices a strange reflection flickering on the wall. Upon investigation, he discovers that his hand can slip right through that portion of the wall. He proceeds to step through, into a strange dimension — a massive, nightmarish version of his furniture store with twisted, endless rooms, corridors and passageways.
When he struggles to describe the experience to Mary, he uses the analogy of someone trying to describe a dog to someone who has never seen a dog and then asking them to draw one. It’s downright impossible.
It’s only when Clark later disappears into the parallel dimension that Mary discovers the truth of his ramblings when she finds and enters the portal in an attempt to rescue him.
Visually, the most impressive aspect of “Backrooms” is the set design — a strange mono-yellow world of trashed furniture, half-buried objects and a backward stop sign. It’s a claustrophobic, dreamlike, alternate reality that looks like it might have sprung from the mind of the surrealist painter Salvador Dali.
Parsons makes the most of dragging the audience deep into this scary labyrinth that appears to stretch on endlessly — a place where one could become hopelessly lost. Worse, he adds the threatening presence of a monstrous, predatory creature to max out the drama and suspense.
As mentioned, Parsons incorporates “Found Horror Footage” schtick in the telling of the story. Ever since the colossal success of “The Blair Witch Project” (1999), young influencers-turned-filmmakers can’t seem to resist the inclusion of fake “found footage” in the creation of spin-off, cinematic, scary stories.
Sadly, until now, no one had been able to replicate the phenomenal success of “The Blair Witch Project,” which became the most profitable movie in history — earning $248 million on a production budget of somewhere between $35,000 to $60,000. It was an unprecedented return on investment.
By comparison, the budget of “Backrooms” was reportedly $10 million.
Watch: Backrooms | Official Trailer HD
While “Backrooms” is stylish, it is not entirely original. The ominously empty environment story angle has been done before in shows like “Severance” and movies like George Lucas’s “THX 1138” (1971). Twisted, dreamlike, alternate reality architecture was a powerful visual element in Christopher Nolan’s “Inception” (2010). And the portal through a wall into another dimension has been done in old “Twilight Zone”-type TV shows from the 1950s. More recently, it was a central plot device in Tobe Hooper’s “Poltergeist” (1982).
Overall, “Backrooms” may be more weird than conventionally scary, but it has tapped into the dark recesses of what this generation’s moviegoers consider to be terrifying. To its credit, it does for furniture stores what “Jaws” did for summer vacation beaches back in 1975.
You may never feel entirely comfortable in any creepy, deserted store or sprawling interior office space ever again. After seeing “Backrooms” there may forever be a nagging, unsettling feeling that you might possibly become lost in a mysterious maze forever.
Drew’s take:
“Backrooms” offers a different take on terror, departing from standard horror fare to explore the nuances of horror using surreal set design and immersive, psychologically terrifying atmosphere.
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