Had someone let me know that Kane Parsons’ Backrooms was about the Flea Market Montgomery pitchman finding his way into an office-park bardo, metastasizing the evils within himself, and tormenting his new-age therapist, it would have skyrocketed to my list of the year’s most-anticipated releases. I’m not really kidding, either — one of the leads, Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), runs a discount furniture shop with incongruous branding (it’s named after the Ottoman Empire, but inexplicably has a pirate mascot played by Clark in the ads), and our other protagonist, Mary (Renate Reinsive), has a self-help side-hustle complete with Paid Programming. These are two of the many threads woven together by Parsons in this pageant of low-fi early-internet culture, a tapestry specifically alluring to those who either didn’t live through those times or were barely cognizant enough to absorb the aesthetic details but never regarded them as mundane. It’s utterly bizarre to think that the Mentos jingle might be the 2040s equivalent of a scratchy big-band phonograph used to stress old-timey surreality, but after something like Five Nights at Freddy’s, it isn’t altogether surprising.
Parsons made his name on YouTube, where he adapted a memorable 4chan post into the web series on which this feature is based, and expanded on this effective aesthetic base without totally spoiling its fun. This isn’t an uncommon route for internet culture to eventually reach mass entertainment (one only needs to look at how the SCP Foundation* has grown in influence to see a comparable example), and Parsons isn’t the first to pilfer the territory given that Severance’s style was, in part, reaped from the same bumper crop. Most horror draws its power from elemental fears — the feeling of being watched, the terror of what lies beyond the grave, spiders, and so forth – and what made that 4chan thread so potent was that it tapped into the creepiness of empty rooms, a sense that something isn’t quite right in the stillness of a vacant office park beneath the humming fluorescents. Parsons’ great success is how well he’s able to preserve that otherworldly vibe even as he descends into more traditional scares, and by God is it a fucking unnerving space to be in.
That tension is what sustains an otherwise dull first act, which comes to an end right after Clark discovers the entrance to the Backrooms, phasing through a wall in the basement level of his furniture store, where a sign might have read “Abandon all great discounts, ye of bad credit” above the portal. It’s a laborious setup, much as it often is when visual stylists feel the need to consider like “character” and “arcs” to ground their work in something resembling traditional storytelling, and using a therapy session as an exposition sledgehammer is bad form. That said, Reinsive and Ejiofor punch above the script’s weight class, and their opposing energies – the former placid and calm, attempting to steer the latter’s bottled rage and disappointment into something resembling growth – make the moments compelling. We don’t really need to know about Clark’s divorce or dashed dreams of becoming an architect for his later descent into madness to be plausible, nor do we really need to know much about Mary’s childhood (and her mother’s deterioration into paranoid mania) for her to be a useful protagonist.
Yet, as soon as Clark stumbles into what looks like a trans-dimensional MoMA exhibition – a mass of clumped furniture sits in the center of that first room – our curiosity is piqued along with his. It’s his curiosity that leads him deeper and deeper into the unending labyrinth, stalked by a minotaur of his own making; each room a different feat of set design under Parsons’ constraints. The environments are nuts, tantalizing in how thoroughly they subvert the mundanity of the office park/furniture store, and watching the characters puzzle their way through the rooms is part of the delight. What upshifts the film into sixth gear is a found-footage segment filmed after Clark decides to prove to a doubting Mary that he’s actually discovered a world between worlds. He ropes two of his employees into it, and of course, one has access to a camcorder** to document everything that’s going on inside. Parsons doesn’t break from the tape’s POV – it’s an uninterrupted sequence tracking the full-on descent of this party into hell, the ante being raised exponentially the further they go down into the complex’s still-forming underbelly until they wind up in a bathroom tiled by Hieronymus Bosch and a Christmas-themed room full of all sorts of unholy creations.
Of course, Mary goes to find her missing patient and winds up in the Backrooms herself, and it’s here that Parsons will probably get the most guff from horror nerds for doing a David Lynch-lite scene. It involves a family dinner that feels plucked from Rabbits, and it’s done well, if not terribly deeply. Moreover, it’s exactly what those complaining would do if given the chance that Parsons got, and I don’t remember a pedigree being involved when it comes to homage, even if one is a YouTuber. How many box-office and critical successes will it take for that stigma to wear off? This isn’t a new trend, after all – Talk to Me came out three years ago. I’ve rolled my eyes at my fair share of projects that have emerged from the bowels of the internet over the years, but, hell, I’d gladly welcome any new pipeline to the big screen if it keeps bringing us pictures like Obsession and Backrooms, regardless of whatever dumb shit Curry Barker says about his Texas Chain Saw project at a Q&A. If most studio horror films had the same rigor applied to realizing their settings or blocking their scenes as in Backrooms, we’d be in a better place. And for all of the first-film mistakes that Parsons makes along the way, it is one hell of a striking feature debut.
* Shouts out to the real ones who read There Is No Antimemetics Division before it hit the bestseller list.
** Don’t think too much about how heavy that camera would be to lug around and how great the framing is – this is the best P.T. riff we’ve had in a really long time. Just enjoy it.