As the 21st century version of the campfire story, the creepypasta has given horror fans a means of crowdsourcing their own frights…but it’s difficult to translate this experience into traditional media. Sometimes it works — Channel Zero is considered a brilliant adaption of Kris Straub’s Candle Cove — but other times it doesn’t; see the attempts to make a slasher movie star out of Slenderman.
Backrooms, A24’s latest chiller, is based on a series of web videos created by Kane Parsons, aka “Kane Pixels” as he’s better known. In the videos, someone finds an empty series of liminal spaces behind an office that just go on and on, and as they venture further the rooms get creepier. A24’s adaption takes that basic idea and…sure makes it yellow.
It’s fine for a series of shorts, but can you really stand staring at spare chartreuse walls for over 90 minutes of time? There’s nothing truly spooky that happens in the trailer, just a lot of scenes where people explore the backrooms to see where they lead. Details you’d expect to see in storage spaces like this, like piles of chairs and spare tables, get less organized and more random as the hallways get deeper. There’s no music either, just a “BRAUMMMMMM” noise and one piano key, which repeats constantly at a steady rhythm throughout all the scenes.
They decide to film their ventures with a standard-definition camcorder, and one of the clips dates a video at “6/29/1990,” making this a period piece…which is interesting because Kane — who also directed this movie — is just 20 years old and has no memory of the 1990s. We’ll see what he gets right!
Surely there’s some kind of monster ahead? I can’t speak for everyone, but I’m not unnerved as much as this trailer wants me to be. Woo, it’s another wall! We’ll see if things get scary or just plain weird when Backrooms opens in theaters May 29.




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