There is a back story to it Back rooms. Since 2011, an eerie photo has been circulating on message boards: a steep entrance to a large, empty room, all yellow, with scratchy wallpaper, carpet, and a floating ceiling, lit by extended fluorescent lights that vaguely seem to lend themselves to other such rooms. In May 2019, an anonymous user posted it on 4chan, asking others to “post disturbing images that just feel ‘off'” as a contribution to “creepypasta,” a genre of paranormal horror stories shared online. The next day, inspired by the cringeworthy moments in a video game when characters cross a border, one fan suggestively called the phenomenon: “If you’re not careful and go out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the back rooms…” A hyperactive internet subculture quickly developed around this idea.
It took five years to identify that the photo was taken in a disused furniture store in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. By then, she had become part of a powerful mythology. In 2022, 16-year-old Kane Parsons, aka “Kane Pixels,” posted a nine-minute YouTube film, “The Backrooms (Found Footage).” A disoriented cameraman wanders through these confusing rooms before being chased by a mysterious “life form”. This chilling film, produced using open source computer graphics, has now had more than 78 million views. Parsons followed it up with a series of other shorts, obliquely revealing a story about a scientific institute, Aysnc, trying to investigate the anomalous, evil world of the “complex”. There are now 24 such pieces by Parsons on YouTube, with 216 million views.
His opinion on Back rooms the myth was a fantastic invention. It sets the story around 1990 so that the found footage appears to be VHS quality, which works great; it is hard to believe that the images are computer generated. Parsons has a knack for turning the camera’s view—our view—into a real, eerie exploration, fueled by an alarming soundtrack. There may be monsters, but he doesn’t stoop to jump cuts. He has an intuitive sense of how built environments that make no sense to us can unnerve us without such tricks.
And so Hollywood, ever hungry for IP, came calling. Fans were skeptical that this world, seen through quasi-documentary snippets, could be turned into a satisfying conventional drama. But Parsons, now 20 and one of the youngest directors of a major motion picture, has shown us how. Made with real actors on real sets, Back rooms remains remarkably faithful to the world he invented digitally. The pre-credits sequence, in which an Async employee gets lost in the maze of rooms, is a direct repeat from the shorts. Next, the film – with a screenplay by Will Soodik (Westworld) – develops into a complete narrative, rooted in character and psychology, capable of sustaining the theatrical audience.
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Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is a failed architect reduced to running a grotesque, pirate-themed furniture store, Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire. Excluded from his wife, he sleeps in deserted parlors. He’s seeing a therapist, Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve), author of a self-help manual, “The Window Within,” who claims she can help him get out of the loop on a new path. But Mary herself had a traumatic upbringing, imprisoned at home by her insane mother, her memories recently sparked by seeing that house destroyed.
One night, in the store’s basement, Clark sees a light behind a wall and discovers that he can step into a seemingly endless world of abandoned office-like rooms and corridors, all at odd angles, scattered with random furniture and other defective items. Things move. There are strange sounds. Excited and scared, Clark returns night after night, trying to figure it out. When he tells Mary about this, showing her a hand-drawn plan, she is not convinced. After Clark disappears, she goes looking for him.
Back rooms turns to body horror and throws in an extended chase sequence before a suspenseful third act turns to the machinations of Async. But its unbearable rooms are memorably realized. Theorists like to call these nightmares “border spaces,” but perhaps there’s a simpler explanation: “For me, Back rooms it’s the cumulative result of a social exhaustion with this industrialized monoculture we’re slipping into,” says Parsons. We all experience buildings without humanity, anonymous, soulless offices, factories and showrooms, multi-story and incomprehensible underground car parks, entire cityscapes, even without the home values as beautiful as Gashel describes. The poetics of space. Back rooms exposes the full horror of it.
Back rooms is in theaters from May 28
(Further reading: Paul Simon talks to God)
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