Horror fans who aren’t already well-versed in the viral “Backrooms” creepypasta may have a hard time understanding, at first glance, why a bunch of empty rooms with yellow wallpaper and fluorescent lighting are inherently creepy enough to drive an entire movie. They may also wonder why A24 initially chose to market that movie, Backrooms, with a teaser that simply pans down floor by floor through a series of those rooms.
Kane Parsons’ Backrooms answers those questions efficiently, and with a tremendous shudder. The expansion of Parsons’ series of YouTube shorts (the most popular of which has been viewed more than 78 million times) is deeply unnerving. Better yet, it’s haunting. In a spectacle-based film environment where it’s easy to forget most of the movies we watch before we’ve even left the theater, Backrooms leaves lingering shivers and ongoing anxieties. It’s smart, “elevated” horror for the tired-of-slashers crowd, but it has plenty of slasher shocks as well. The best recent comparison is Zach Cregger’s Weapons, another deeply frightening movie also built around excavating the uncanny, without unpacking all its mysteries.
Originally inspired by an anonymous 4chan post and expanded online by eager contributors, the concept of the Backrooms centers around a liminal space outside of reality, where empty spaces “remember” and reproduce real spaces poorly, often remixing or blurring them. Parsons’ YouTube series (posted under the name Kane Pixels, starting in his mid-teens) mostly consists of found-footage-style videos shot by the research institute Async, which deliberately tore a hole in reality, accessed the Backrooms, and sent agents in to explore. These videos are mostly fragmentary found-footage clips that suggest a larger story without actually telling it. They’re spooky and atmospheric rather than narrative, and almost none of them are inherently frightening. They also don’t answer many questions about either Async or the Backrooms. The movie version fills in some of the blanks as it tells a complete narrative — but crucially, it leaves plenty of mystery and opacity behind.
Chiwetel Ejiofor stars as Clark, a deeply frustrated failed architect who’s tried to eke out a second act by opening a furniture store. His wife is still living in their house, but has kicked him out due to his alcohol abuse and constant lies to cover it up. So he’s sleeping in the store, among his own cheap, shoddy furniture. Then one night, while investigating the building’s mysterious electrical issues, he discovers a portal in the store’s wall that leads into a seemingly endless, impossible space, where the fluorescent lights provide a constant oppressive hum, the physical geography is uncanny and illogical, and random, often misshapen items mirroring his own furniture grow out of the walls and floors.
Clark starts exploring, drawing in his employee Kat (Shrinking’s Lukita Maxwell), her boyfriend Bobby (A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms’ Finn Bennett), and Clark’s therapist Mary (Renate Reinsve). He quickly becomes obsessed. He also rapidly realizes there’s something else in the mysterious space — something unpredictable and unknown.
The script, from Ash Vs. Evil Dead’s Will Soodik, is impressively economical. He gives all these characters enough depth to make them interesting, while withholding enough to keep them mysterious. Soodik does the same with the actual Backrooms: Newbies can walk into this film with no previous knowledge of the internet phenomenon, but longtime fans of the collaborative Backrooms fiction will find this film expands significantly on the mythos without robbing it of too much mystery. Clark in particular is beautifully balanced between an obvious, stock character and an unknowable enigma.
Parsons proves effective at expanding his own shorts into a feature-length story that still captures the unsettling otherness of liminal space. The sheer illogic of the Backrooms feels threatening and alien; the remixing of commonplace objects and architecture into new forms feels nightmarish. The omnipresent fluorescent hum hanging over it all is oppressive enough to keep viewers’ nerves on edge.
From the first moment Clark steps into this new reality, there’s a sense that anything could happen, that a monstrosity as unearthly as the space itself could be around any corner. Parsons plays fair with the audience on the shocks, saving the jump scares for when they matter, and using the Backrooms’ mixture of bland, uniform lighting and impenetrable dark spaces to keep his audience uneasy. When events come to a head, though, he shifts into pure terror mode.
The sheer fact that Backrooms’ characters aren’t uneasy enough in the early going is enough to keep the tension high as the story rolls out. Clark and Bobby in particular explore the endless new space with near-manic excitement, while ignoring Kat’s understandable anxiety and calls for caution. The movie ultimately takes them in a profoundly eerie direction that feels like a conscious hat-tip to David Lynch, particularly in some of the specific imagery.
At the same time, Soodik and Parsons give the twists a satisfying internal consistency that lands more solidly than Lynch’s often-opaque dream logic, though it still leaves just as much to discuss, debate, and unpack as a good Lynch movie. By the end, they’ve answered just enough of the obvious questions to let audiences walk out the door feeling satisfied, without cutting off any further routes of possibility.
Like so many of the most memorable, most surprising horror movies, Backrooms winds up feeling ripe for sequels and spin-offs. The only question is whether more movies in this vein could maintain the mysteries hanging over the Backrooms. Horror sequels tend to overexplain and overdevelop, answering questions that shouldn’t really be answered. Here’s hoping we never fully find out what the Backrooms are, or exactly why they make the hair on the back of our collective necks stand on end.
Backrooms premieres in theaters on May 29.
