JONESING FOR FILMS

At my day job, we have forms that people use to sign out certain items. Sometimes, someone will take the last copy and make a dozen photocopies of the copy instead of photocopying the original master document. If this happens several times, the quality of the document eventually gets worse. Especially if the document is black an white with any shading, words can become harder to read and small little blemishes in the copy can become exaggerated and more pronounced. It is still a copy of the original, but a little less so each time.

This is the concept that helped me understand Backrooms, the horror sensation that was spawned from a series of online viral videos involving a parallel dimension that people fall into that consist of seemingly endless empty and abandoned rooms that look just a little off.

Set in 1990, down on his luck furniture store owner Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), stumbles into the backrooms in the basement of his store after noticing issues with power surges and flickering lights. He begins exploring the area, journey further and further into the mystery of it all, mapping it out. Unfulfilled in life as a failed architect, and having separated from his wife, he has been seeing a therapist, Mary (Renate Reinsve), who also feels stuck in life and is reflecting on her past. What is found in the backrooms is more than just empty rooms.

I’ve had limited exposure to the online videos, having only seen the original where a cameraman on a low budget movie falls into them and is stalked by what looks like a creature that is a cross between a coatrack and wire hangers. The basis for the horror here is based on liminal space, something that was a big part of Exit 8 earlier this year, a film about a time loop inside a subway corridor. Abandoned spaces or in-between spaces are supposed to create a level of eeriness as we observe these areas in ways they were not intended. A non-horror example of this might be the brief respite at the abandoned elementary school in Children of Men, an empty playground intended for kids in a world where babies are no longer being born.

The surrealness and eeriness of the backrooms is that of a maze of abandoned hotel conference rooms, hallways, and office space areas. Everything looks beige and yellow and bathed in the sickly dull lighting of fluorescent office bulbs to also give it a slightly unnatural look.

A short prologue is an effective introduction to the concept of the Backrooms, which is something like a cross between the Upside Down in Stranger Things on Netflix and “The Tethered” in Jordan Peele’s Us. While trying to make contact with the rest of his team and get extracted, a researcher is chased by an unseen figure.

While there are a few jump scares, this opener is what the film does best, creating anxiety in the viewer by having the protagonists of the story being pursued by something off camera. What I find most effective for found footage or POV scenes in movies is the forced limited viewpoint. If something is pursuing the person (and the audience by proxy), but we cannot see what is coming unless the camera turns, that ratchets up the anxiety of being caught from behind.

Ejiofor and Reinsve are two outstanding actors, and both portray characters here who are dealing with trauma in their lives, past or present. How both of them approach their trauma informs how they perceive and respond to the Backrooms. For one, they represent hope and comfort, while for the other, they represent fear and distorted reality. However, the ending hints that they both might see promise in there somewhere.

2026 has had a tremendously strong slate of horror movies. Surprisingly, the majority of films I have managed to see in the theaters has been predominantly horror (and that doesn’t even include Melania). Backrooms makes a strong case for being the best of the bunch. The box office for the last 20 years or so has been dominated by superhero movies with comics as the primary source material, given the success of Backrooms, the primary source of adaptations might start to become online content instead. Backrooms easily sets up for being a horror franchise.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars