Backrooms

Description

The Backrooms: A Reality Without Beginning or End

Maybe we’re already living in the Backrooms, a reality where YouTubers make films ten times better than directors with twenty or thirty years of experience? In this reality, directors aren’t made—they’re born. There’s simply no other explanation.

Backrooms is a film without a beginning or an end, made for visualophiles and aesthetes. The cinematography stands out with its vibrant colors and close-ups, spiced up with retro-futurism, 90s aesthetics, and a dash of found-footage style.

The film doesn’t give you the answers to a single question it poses. This leaves us to fill in the blanks and interpret the plot however we want. Yet, out of habit after years of spoon-fed Hollywood movies, you still find yourself craving answers to at least the key questions.

I feel like it’s exactly these kinds of ambiguous, understated films that stick with you for a long time, making you want to revisit them. In this sense, I often think of the Spanish film The Wailing (El llanto). Yeah, it really got under my skin. It might not seem like anything groundbreaking, but I’ve already mentioned it a few times.

In terms of atmosphere and visual style, Backrooms really echoes Obsession and Synchronic by Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead. And just like those two, it refuses to give you all the answers. It also bears a slight resemblance to Vivarium starring Jesse Eisenberg.

Back in 2022, as a 17-year-old teenager, Kane Parsons uploaded a series of short Backrooms videos to his YouTube channel, Kane Pixels. One of them racked up over 80 million views.

Something like that couldn’t fly under the radar of major studios. Under the A24 banner, the studio approached Parsons to direct a feature film based on his viral shorts.

He was just 20 years old when the feature film dropped, and he also co-composed the score.

If you enjoyed Backrooms, you can transition from a viewer to a participant and experience the horrors for yourself in the game Backrooms: Escape Together.

There are a few other games out there (I found four) that borrow their gameplay and concepts from Kane Parsons’ videos, but in my opinion, Backrooms: Escape Together is by far the most polished and arguably the closest to the source material. It features full voice acting and localization.
At the time of the film’s release, there was a collaborative in-game event with A24 to celebrate the movie’s premiere.