To understand my family’s relationship to The Backrooms (concept, not movie), I invite to enjoy this minute-long video that my child made in 2023, using a green screen.
When the Backrooms movie was announced, he was already a year into his obsession with the internet videos and lore. By the time the movie came out, he was four years deep. He’d watched every video, played every game, and read every wiki entry. He knows all the levels, all the entities, all the theories. He is a Backrooms expert. He is the “I was into that band before they got big” guy of The Backrooms.
A brief aside: when I was a youngster in the late ’90s, I went on a road trip to the west coast, and traded zines with various folks I met along the way, as one did in those days. One of my faves was a hilarious zine centred entirely around the author’s annoyance at the new (poseur!!) fans of her favourite band, a band she’d seen play in countless tiny clubs across California in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Now, they were getting really popular, she felt alienated from a fandom she’d helped form, and she was grumpy about it! It was a great zine. (The band was No Doubt.)
But, back to Backrooms, and Backrooms. Entering (or no-clipping) into the parallel reality (internet lore, not movie lore) is the result of a kind of real-life-404 error, a glitch that lands you unexpectedly in a space that feels like the embodiment of our contemporary anxieties, the deep isolation / loneliness / alienation of digital-era capitalism. It makes sense that Kane Parsons got into making Backrooms videos (and that they went viral) during the early years of the pandemic, when life itself felt like it was a weird, sad, parallel version of the reality we used to know (and maybe love?).
The internet phenomenon has a lot of fans who are kids, more than perhaps the adults who are just getting into it realize. I’m not a “let kids have unfettered access to the firehose of nightmares on YouTube” kind of parent, but I rarely censor my kid’s access to weird, original, creative niches, online worlds that (mostly very young) folks have built. The Backrooms is a perfect example of something that wasn’t, at face value, age-appropriate for a six year old. And yet, my son fell in love with the imaginative and elaborate world that Kane Parsons (and some others) created, and I was very much okay with it.
I have no way of quantifying the 8-to-12-year-old Backrooms demographic, most of whom probably aren’t seeing the film, but it’s got to be enormous. All the kids I know have been aware of The Backrooms longer than their grown ups. The internet is reporting that a very young audience is driving the box office for the film, with under-21s making up nearly 50% of theatre goers, which makes sense. The 14-to-20-year-olds who were stuck at home during early COVID lockdowns grew up with Parsons’ videos, or grew up hearing their friends describe the videos, which is how kids have found out about cool things that their parents won’t let them see since the dawn of time.
People have been freaking out about how YouTubers are taking over Hollywood because films like Backrooms and Obsession are outperforming bigger studio productions, and “proving,” I suppose, that youths raised on the internet understand how to tell stories in ways that actually grab people. I don’t particularly want my entertainment landscape to be completely taken over by young white YouTube bros, but so far, Kane Parsons seems pretty good. I have enjoyed the few interviews I’ve seen, in which he comes across as thoughtful, and unpretentious. Plus, he’s not a cinephile. Refreshing!
The “YouTubers are taking over” commentary centres around the fact that these creators have amassed large followings (true), but often glosses over the fact that films like Backrooms and Obsession are telling original stories. That’s gotta be part of it, don’t you think? We, the beleaguered audiences, are starved for original stories. Hollywood churns out remake after reboot after sequel, an endless parade of (sure, beloved, but also at this point, kind of boring) franchise films, and we are all tired of it.
Obviously, even though my kid is only ten, the whole family had to go see Backrooms as soon as it came out. I have always loved liminal spaces in general, and I find the phenomenon of The Backrooms really appealing. The drab, windowless, ambiguously-commercial space really does capture a fear that feels very of-the-moment. For me, it inspires a mostly pleasant and tolerable sort of existential dread (unlike watching the news, which causes panic attacks).
I loved the movie. It’s not too scary or gratuitously gory, but there’s some disturbing moments, a few good jump scares, and an atmosphere of genuine unease. It’s also beautiful. Kudos to the production design and wardrobe teams, the cinematographer(s), and everyone who contributed to the ugly-beautiful retro feel of the sets and costumes.
My kid, though he did enjoy it, was disappointed that the film is not canon! I tried to explain to him that for many audiences, Backrooms was their first exposure to the whole idea of The Backrooms, so trying to cram in several years’ worth of backstory would have been tricky and confusing at best, or incomprehensible at worst. He wasn’t convinced. He liked Captain Clark, but he would have preferred to see OG entities like the Bacteria. Ya can’t please ’em all, Kane Parsons.
The kiddo was also frustrated by the (minor spoiler) ambiguous ending. He’s not yet used to stories that don’t tie things up in a neat bow, but how could neat bows even exist in a world as off-kilter as The Backrooms? We had some good conversations about what it all meant, and what might come next. It gave us a lot to ponder. And that, as I told him in what I hope was not a deeply uncool mom-trying-to-teach-a-lesson way, is what great art is all about.
Colin and I have gotten into a lot of fun online worlds and internet subcultures (mostly in the horror or WTF space) through our son’s interests. I’m very grateful for his endless curiosity and discerning tastes. These worlds are original and unexpected, and Hollywood should learn a lesson from them. Hopefully, that lesson is “take a chance on original art” and not “plumb the depths of YouTube for anything with a following and try to make more money from it” but we’ll see.
After the Backrooms experience, I can offer one word of warning to Hollywood. If someone tries to make an SCP movie, they’d better not fuck it up!
You are spot on with “pleasant existential dread”. I loved how tense I felt the whole time. And yes, much better than my daily panic attacks. (Think I might have you beat there, as an American 😩) Love love the Backrooms dance!