Christopher Nolan, while promoting his forthcoming adaptation of The Odyssey, positioned Marvel movies as our culture’s closest kin to the Homeric epic. He has a point. Yet its true equivalent was slowly compiled, post by post, in some obscure corner of the internet, in a manner no different to how tales of Ancient Greek heroics were stitched together by generations of travelling performers.
In May 2019, an anonymous post on the online forum 4chan featured an image of a vacated home furnishings store in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Its walls were a sickly yellow, its carpet beige and strangely easy to imagine yourself bleeding out on. An accompanying paragraph referenced the concept of “noclipping” in video games, when a player (intentionally or not) breaks beyond the boundaries of a map and into a liminal space not made for human eyes. If that happens in our reality, the post warned, “you’ll end up in the Backrooms”. Users across the internet then slowly began to expand on this world that, as if like Odysseus, one might be cursed to wander in search of a route back home, with monsters at every turn.
Filmmaker Kane Parsons is the Homer of the Backrooms. They aren’t his invention, but his phenomenally popular YouTube series (the first instalment, released in 2022, now has nearly 80 million views) helped collate and codify all that wider online lore. Now the film industry finally wants a piece. With the A24-backed Backrooms, the 20-year-old Parsons has been hired to translate his work to the big screen.
It’s not the scariest, or even quite the smartest, horror you’ll see this year (it lacks the shock factor of the recent Obsession, written and directed by fellow YouTube graduate Curry Barker). Still, it’s mesmeric and wildly unique in a way I suspect will stand the test of time, since nothing else put to film feels this much like watching the collective Gen Z nightmare come to life – a half-confused grief over never having lived in the analogue era, an attraction to and fear of VHS infomercials, sofa stores, and TV dinner trays.
Backrooms suffers slightly, in fact, from the fact that a Hollywood writer, Ash vs Evil Dead’s Will Soodik, has been enlisted to provide Parsons’s surrealist found footage series with a more traditional narrative. Here, Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) – a divorced, failed architect who owns a furniture showroom – discovers a door to an ever-replicating space behind his store’s walls, its furniture either piled up or half-melted into the floor, and entirely vacant except for the lingering sense that it’s not.
His therapist, Dr Mary Kline (Sentimental Value’s Renate Reinsve), is rightly concerned. So are his junior employees, Bobby (Finn Bennett) and Kat (Lukita Maxwell), stuck in the old horror archetypes of the dumbass boyfriend and pleading girlfriend, and whose borrowed camcorder is inevitably roped in to investigate.
Ejiofor and Reinsve, however, are smart casting choices. Neither is associated with the genre, and their focus is much less on the expression of terror than on its character and what the Backrooms represent. Soodik’s script shifts them towards the personal, as an expression of the neural pathways formed in childhood and then endlessly, claustrophobically repeated in adulthood, albeit in increasingly distorted ways.
Parsons recently told an interviewer that he’s never seen David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. He’s strictly not a cinephile, by his own admission. It’s ironic considering how Lynchian the Backrooms and their reveal of suburban America’s sinister underbelly evidently are. There’s a healthy dose of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, too (Ejiofor does a great Jack Torrance).
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But that the director’s likely received these influences second hand only makes the film more intriguing as a product of the generational subconscious. There’s a clear relationship here with the world of video games, which are rich with Lynchian spaces and a Twin Peaks-ian mix of bureaucracy and the supernatural (Parsons was the one to introduce Async, a company conducting research on the Backrooms).
While the Backrooms, to the non-online and the non-gamer, might seem like a byproduct of Apple TV+’s Severance, their language has been deployed for years by games like Control, The Exit 8, and Lethal Company. But the many video game adaptations we’ve seen haven’t really dared to tell their stories in the medium’s minimalist, environment-driven way, where characters learn through the objects around them. Backrooms does. And it’s all the more fascinating for it. We’ll have to see who follows in Parsons’s footsteps, but his film might very well end up defining a generation.
Dir: Kane Parsons. Starring: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, Lukita Maxwell. Cert 15, 110 minutes
‘Backrooms’ is in cinemas from 29 May