When BACKROOMS came out in May, I was annoyed by the hype. I kept seeing articles about the rise of “liminal horror” which, as far as I could tell, boiled down to people pretending to be afraid of hallways and empty malls. Like so many annoying things it was born on the internet in Youtube videos and “creepypasta,” which is a word not even good enough to use as a placeholder. I object to its common usage, I resent that I had to repeat it, and I assert my rights as an old person to not have to be totally sure I know its definition. Whatever it is I disagree with it, so I was skeptical of this BACKROOMS, to say the least.

But the movie was an undeniable phenomenon. It wasn’t as big as OBSESSION, but a $10 million movie making $401 million is significant, whether or not it’s written and directed by a 20-year-old named Kane Parsons. The word on it was positive from all age groups, and it stars Chiwetel Eijiofor and Renate Reinsve, which kind of makes it a real movie. So, like with OBSESSION, I accepted that it was probly gonna be pretty good, it wasn’t fair for me to pre-judge it, and I let my guard down. Mostly.

Ejiofor plays Clark, a guy who owns a furniture store called Clark’s Ottoman Empire. He had a bad divorce because he was at the furniture store too much, and now he lives at the store. I thought it was supposed to be going out of business (it’s mostly empty, mostly unstaffed, mostly without customers) but I guess not, because he has his only known employees Kat (Lukita Maxwell, AFRAID) and Bobby (Finn Bennett, WARFARE) tape a commercial with him playing a pirate. I did not find this to be a believable or well thought out fictional business, but it makes more sense than the beloved and heavily merchandised corn syrup clown mascot of CLOWN IN A CORNFIELD, so I’m gonna give it a pass.

There have been electrical problems in the building, and while looking around trying to fix it he notices light coming from behind a crack in the wall. When he touches the wall he falls through it like it’s a portal. On the other side is a shifting maze of similar bland hallways and rooms, mostly empty but sometimes there’s furniture that’s piled up or weirdly shaped or protruding from the floor as if reaching in from another dimension.

Reinsve (SENTIMENTAL VALUE) plays Clark’s therapist Mary. In the first appointment we see with her she role plays as his wife, she needles him about having too many beers and failing to become an architect, and he gets too into it and has a mean fight with her. Not even at all self conscious about revealing to his therapist that he’s a jerk. The second appointment is even more uncomfortable because he tries to tell her about the Backrooms, he’s very manic, and she’s understandably perplexed until he storms out saying he’ll prove it and she’ll have to apologize.

So that’s when he gets Kat and Bobby to come with him into the Backrooms, with Bobby’s camera. I’m sorry to report that this long, pivotal set piece is presented as found footage. It has a gimmick that I don’t think makes sense but is pretty cool: they tie a rope to Bobby as he walks down a steep hallway to find out what’s at the bottom. Answer: a dirty room with some piles of clothes, plus some kind of horrifying monster of terror. You don’t see the creature but would you believe it if I told you IT CHASES HIM AND THEN THE CAMERA FALLS DOWN? Never before have your pants been so shitted.

There are obviously good found footage movies, but to build up to a confrontation with something scary and then just have a bunch of jostling and breathing and then the video stops, that doesn’t work on me anymore. When it cuts back to the real movie and it’s Mary in her life and she figures out her patient has gone missing and decides to check on him, that I like. That’s a good structure.

Ejiofor is a great actor, he’s been one of my guys since REDBELT, but this movie isn’t so kind to him, because it identifies two acting feats he can’t pull off as smoothly as the regular ones:

1. Walking around for a long time looking at stuff and being surprised

2. Saying scripted dialogue in a found footage format

I’m not saying he’s terrible, but his acting in these contexts really calls attention to the fact that yep, this guy is acting. Ooh, look how he touches that weird chair he found. Hear how he grunts as he crawls through a little door. Acting. (Somehow Reinsve does better with that stuff.)

It’s not bad. It’s a pretty well made movie. It’s pretty imaginative. It’s not for me. I wish I’d seen it without the hype, not knowing it was directed by a 20 year old, so I wouldn’t be thinking oh I get it, he thinks analog video and buzzing fluorescent lights and ugly yellow walls are creepy because they’re before his time. It’s not that different from how scratchy old film has denoted scary for so long, or an old timey song playing on a tinny speaker from somewhere. Which, incidentally, Parsons also does. Some tropes never die.

It seems to be set in the early ‘90s. My teenage years, Parson’s negative-ten years. We know this mainly because there’s an anti-apartheid t-shirt and a large computer monitor. It doesn’t feel anything like the ’90s to me, but I’m sure the sixties period pieces I watched didn’t feel like the sixties to my parents. It happens.

Although it’s mostly about two adult characters experiencing simulated adult problems, it’s tuned to the fears and tastes of a young person. If you grew up on Youtube videos and horror video games then wandering around looking at things and hearing weird sounds is a powerful scare experience, I assume. I can admire it a little like I would a haunted house maze, but I want something more. (I have also read that this is an extension of a 25 episode web series by Parsons, itself inspired by internet writings based on a photo of an empty yellow furniture room store posted on 4chan? Now a major motion picture. I should’ve known the Wikipedia page for this was none of my business.)

I was intrigued by a glimpse somewhere of a bizarre spindly creature that must be from the web series, but it’s not in the movie. Instead the thing terrorizing them turns out to be a tall pirate mascot (7’ 7” Robert Bobroczkyi, also the Offspring in ALIEN: ROMULUS) with a cartoony animatronic Chiwetel face. I laughed out loud. I’m surprised if that’s something the young people find creepy, but more power to them.

Fortunately, there is a little more payoff than that, some strange business that I’ve heard described as sort of a parallel to AI, the way it creates iterations of people who once existed but doesn’t get them right. I like that reading. But before it got there I kept thinking this should be called WOULDN’T IT BE SO FREAKY THOUGH IF YOU THINK ABOUT IT? Other than the rote found footage shake-scares there aren’t many scares per se – it’s more about the psychological terror of wouldn’t it be weird if there was a weird place. I assume that’s real creepy to some, while others are invested in the mythology about the people who know about and are exploring the Backrooms (Mark Duplass) which I guess is what you care about if you watch the web videos or the version that was re-released in theaters with some extra video thing after the credits. It reminds me of the online worldbuilding stuff they used to market THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT and CLOVERFIELD, except in this case that was the original work and the movie was the tie-in.

Last week when I reviewed OBSESSION I argued that writer/director Curry Barker coming from Youtube wasn’t anything new – he made horror shorts and a feature, he was practicing before he worked on a bigger scale. Parsons is a little different just because he wasn’t an independent filmmaker working on a shoestring – he was courted by studios to adapt his viral videos, so he had many more resources to work with. Between the two I would definitely not have guessed that BACKROOMS is the one that cost ten times as much as the other one, but I guess maybe it’s just to pay those two great actors.

I know I’d be easier on BACKROOMS if it was just a regular movie nobody had said much about. So take my complaints with a grain of salt. I got nothing much against it. I definitely don’t want scary hallway to become the dominant type of horror movie, but I’ve been around the block a few times. There’s always some new popular subgenre we all get mad about, and life goes on. And then there’s another one. It’s fine. Have fun in the hallways, kids.