The horror flick “Backrooms” originates from an unforgettable image: an endless maze of eerily abandoned, generic commercial spaces, punctuated by odd stacks of furniture, all wall-to-wall industrial carpet, drop-ceilings, buzzing yellow fluorescent lights, no windows, no way out.
It’s soul-sucking office spaces denuded of cubicles and emptied of purpose. It’s dead Kmarts or Sears department stores. The actual origins are viral riffing on 2002 renovation photos of a HobbyTown in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.
It’s the feeling of rooms built out to the stupid specifics of retail, but now turned into cursed ghost towns. It’s the feeling of major, century-old corporate edifices collapsing. It’s the deeply unsettling feeling of something terribly wrong with America.
“There’s a lot of simplicity in the setup that preys on the anxiety people have around the stage of industrialization we’re at,” the film’s 20-year-old director Kane Parsons recently told The New York Times. “The world is becoming increasingly atomized and sort of lonely. We have so much available to us now—at least in this part of the world—yet it feels like all the stuff we have means less and less.”
Parsons spent about a decade making YouTube videos, currently attracting more than three million subscribers, before indie darling A24 offered to produce his Hollywood debut. One of those fans is our 13-year-old. We bought opening weekend tickets to one of the nearly sold out showings at the perfect venue: a local mall that’s been a zombie for practically my whole life. Even the theater there feels abandoned, seemingly staffed by just one last lonely disaffected teen ticket-taker.
The beginning of “Backrooms” can be seen as the story of Clark (played by Chiwetel Ejiofor), a failed architect, complaining of being kicked out his house by his wife, operating a dying discount furniture business, drinking too much, secretly sleeping in the showroom at night. Clark’s life is already a maze of emotional dead ends before he stumbles into the terrifying Backrooms. It’s one of those horror films predicated upon him being unable to resist exploring a place into which no one in their right mind would venture—especially as it becomes bloody clear that there’s a monster at the end of the book.
Our screening was enhanced by adolescents in the audience melodramatically groaning or gasping dumb jokes at especially scary moments—prompting others to “hiss” and holler “shut the fuck up!”—prompting giggles.
The second part of the film can be seen as the story of Clark’s therapist, Mary (Renate Reinsve), who grew up confined by a devastatingly agoraphobic mother. After Clark goes missing, she tracks down the Backrooms in hopes of rescuing him.
Our 13-year-old proposes that “Backrooms” is about Clark clinging to his past, when his life had more promise, while Mary fights to escape her traumatic history. Let me also tell you that the 13-year-old insists that I don’t get the Backrooms lore so my take is embarrassingly misguided.
I wonder if at first we’re in some mental projection of Clark—and then we’re in a mental projection of Mary—or maybe it was all in Mary’s mind. Maybe Clark is an unreliable witness, maybe he’s been a monster the whole time. The mysteries and hints are soooo pleasurable to ponder. I suspect Parson’s doesn’t know what it all is or means, and any moves to try to explain it make the dazzling mystery of the Backrooms smaller and disappointing.
Parsons originally developed “Backrooms” as a series of more than 20 YouTube shorts created with the 3D modeling software Blender that he began posting about four years ago. They often feel like glitchy scraps of evidence or staticky “found footage.”
“Holy shit! What the fuck is this place?” shouts a man who has somehow fallen into the Backrooms in one of the YouTubes. “This can’t be real.”
The YouTube videos feel quite different from the film—they feel more literal somehow as they explore a different story: a morally indifferent Silicon Valley corporation that has accidentally-on-purpose opened a “threshold” into the “complex,” then sent hazmat-suited employees in to explore the cursed labyrinth, aiming to exploit it as endless office and manufacturing and warehouse space. Of course, the explorers get separated. They get lost. They drop through time. They get hunted by a feral stick figure.
Parsons arrives with this new “Backrooms” feature film as a sure-handed director with a stunningly distinct vision, something reminiscent of David Lynch’s ravishingly unforgettable uncanny images—and like David Lynch maybe they don’t all quite add up. It doesn’t hurt for one’s first Hollywood film to star a past Oscar-nominee and a winner of Best Actress at Cannes, and to be staffed by a skilled Hollywood crew. At times, the film deploys the shaky first-person camera of “The Blair Witch Project.” It has us trapped in a maze of strange rooms as in video games, or anxiety dreams. And if this is your first experience of Parsons’s faceless goons in hazmat suits, they can feel like quotations from early Steven Spielberg alien flicks. “Backrooms” gets less scary and less compelling as it endeavors to explain what the hell is maybe going on. But the vision, the mood, Parsons’s potential are riveting. More!
“Backrooms” is an immediate hit—made for $10 million, it sold $82 million in tickets during its opening weekend. At our showing, the parking lot was full and the 20-screen theater was screening the film multiple times each hour. We stayed to the end of the credits (nothing to see there), then out of curiosity snuck into a theater across from ours, in a door, down a bending dark corridor, before the screen revealed the “Backrooms.” Then we snuck into the theater next to ours, in the door, down a dark corridor, where the screen revealed another showing of “Backrooms.” We were trapped in our own real-life maze. Then we left and wandered past the mall’s vacant storefronts, a desolate food court, down the abandoned corridors toward home.
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