Chiwetel Ejiofor has been on a lot of movie sets, but Backrooms was something different: a 30,000\u00a0sq ft labyrinth of apparently random corridors and\u00a0chambers, all carpeted, fluorescent lit and decorated in the\u00a0same sickly yellow wallpaper. It was so big that people were getting lost in it, says Ejiofor: \u201cEspecially on those first days. As you try to navigate your way around and you\u2019re like: \u2018I\u2019m sure it\u2019s this door, I\u2019m sure that\u2019s the way.\u2019\u201d He\u2019s laughing at the recollection. \u201cAnd you find yourself just back in the wrong corner of the whole studio and you\u2019re like: \u2018Get me some help!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
This is kind of the point of Backrooms \u2013 the movie and the online phenomenon that spawned it. It\u2019s a concept that takes some unpacking, but as the premise for a buzzy A24 horror freakout, you could summarise it as something like \u201cThe Blair Witch Project meets Severance\u201d or \u201cThe Shining set in an infinite Travelodge\u201dor maybe \u201cthe exact opposite of a Wes Anderson movie\u201d. Comparisons fall short, partly because the Backrooms concept feels as if it\u2019s come from another world \u2013 a parallel dimension, even. Ejiofor concurs: \u201cThere was stuff that we were doing by the end of the film that I was just like: \u2018This is among the most bizarre things I have ever been involved in.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Possibly even freakier than the Backrooms concept is the fact that its creator is just 20 years old. The Californian director, Kane Parsons, had never made a feature film before this. Like most gen Zers, he\u00a0hadn\u2019t even been to the cinema that much: \u201cIt\u2019s something that I didn\u2019t ever make enough time for in the past,\u201d Parsons says, half\u2011apologetically, over a video chat from Los Angeles. \u201cGrowing up with YouTube<\/a>, it\u2019s like there\u2019s a lower requirement to go out and consume through a cinema.\u201d<\/p>\n Whether Parsons is the death of cinema or its future remains to be seen. In person he\u2019s neither shy and awkward nor cocky and overconfident; more serious and focused, and very talkative \u2013 \u201csorry, I\u2019m a rambler,\u201d he says at one point. He\u2019s no novice, either: Parsons has been making films since he was a small child, he says, and has made several hundred of them. He actually spends more time creating content than consuming it, he says. Still, walking on to that vast set, and directing seasoned crew members and actors twice his age, such as Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve<\/a> and Mark Duplass, is an experience most newcomers would find pretty intimidating, if\u00a0not downright\u00a0terrifying.<\/p>\n \u201cI recognised it as a big, potentially jarring, leap forward,\u201d Parsons acknowledges matter-of-factly. \u201cLike: \u2018Holy shit, I am on an accelerated fast track somehow, because some shadowy overlord decided to \u2026\u2019 I have no idea how all\u00a0of this spiralled to the place it\u2019s\u00a0at now. But I was there, and I know I wanted to make the movie, and I knew how to make what I make online. And I feel when it comes to the actual creative direction, knowing what\u2019s wanted, that\u2019s there.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2018I have no idea how all of this spiralled to the place it\u2019s at now\u2019 \u2026 Kane Parsons. Photograph: Jeremy Cox<\/p>\n The origin stories of the backrooms and Parsons himself are intertwined. It began with a single photograph, taken in 2003 but posted in May 2019 on a 4chan message board inviting users to submit \u201cdisquieting images that just feel \u2018off\u2019\u201d. This particular photo, of a vacant shop space in Oshkosh, Wisconsin \u2013 fluorescent lighting, suspended ceilings, that dingy yellow wallpaper \u2013 somehow struck a nerve and took on a life of its own in the fertile realms of \u201ccreepypasta\u201d \u2013 viral online horror content. People began writing stories based on it, expanding this imaginary realm into a whole universe of unsettling yet mundane\u00a0\u201climinal space<\/a>\u201d. The r\/Backrooms subreddit now has over 350,000 members. One backrooms wiki<\/a> catalogues reams of fan fiction, 100 different levels and an index of \u201centities\u201d inhabiting them.<\/p>\n \u201cI first saw that image when I was\u00a0in eighth grade,\u201d says Parsons. \u201cI probably saved it to my computer at the time and was generally like: \u2018I get an interesting feeling from this.\u2019\u201d At that stage, he was living in Petaluma, just north of San Francisco, still sharing a room with his brother. His parents divorced, amicably, when he was seven. He lived with, and feels equally connected to, both of them, he says. His father is a visual effects artist and his mother a therapist. \u201cThe two of those perspectives probably have shaped many, many things in many, many ways that I could not even begin to start expressing.\u201d<\/p>\n His dad was not a direct influence, but he gravitated towards 3D animation \u201cthrough just general osmosis\u201d, he says. He grew up drawing, playing sandbox games such as Minecraft and watching YouTube \u201chow-to\u201d videos. Then, in 2020, Covid happened. \u201cI did not have a specifically negative experience personally during the pandemic,\u201d he says. \u201cFor me, it was mostly marked by like: \u2018Whoa, no school. Amazing.\u2019\u201d He used the time to teach himself Blender, the free, open-source modelling software.<\/p>\n Parsons\u2019 first backrooms-based short was an exercise in sustained terror in itself, extrapolating that initial creepy image into a creepy point-of-view, found-footage horror \u2013 all garish 90s video quality, humming fluorescent lights and corners you hardly dare look round (and we are not alone down there). He uploaded it to YouTube in 2022, where it rapidly gathered a \u201cscariest video on the internet\u201d buzz. Within two weeks, it had 20m views; it has nearly 80m today. Even this was not a novel experience for Parsons: for the previous few years, he had been posting shorts related to the beloved manga Attack on Titan<\/a>, which regularly clocked up 10m views. The backrooms stuff he saw more as a \u201cpalette cleanser\u201d initially, to test out his effects skills. But the response encouraged him to carry on.<\/p>\n Ejiofor as Clark, a failed architect, in Backrooms.<\/p>\n By the time Hollywood caught up with all this in 2023, Parsons\u00a0\u2013 still in high school \u2013 had made 22\u00a0more episodes of his backrooms series, steadily adding more depth and backstory (in one eight-minute instalment, a team of government researchers analyse the backrooms\u2019 ceiling panels<\/a> and lighting components in absurdly forensic detail). People still find it difficult to believe these YouTube shorts are 100% digital animation, created by a teenager with a laptop, but Parsons confirms that they really are.<\/p>\n Translating this lore into a feature-length movie, with fleshed-out characters played by actors, was a challenge \u2013 especially since the power of the concept largely stems from its inhuman, depopulated soullessness. Reinsve, better known for arthouse drama such as Joachim Trier\u2019s recent Sentimental Value, was initially \u201cscared\u201d, she says, of working with \u201csomeone who doesn\u2019t really have their references in movies\u201d. \u201cBut she was also intrigued by \u201cthis new wave of building something creative\u201d. When she met Kane she was persuaded. \u201cI just found him so smart and eloquent\u201d, and by the time they were shooting, she was humouring his lack of film knowledge. \u201cOne of our first conversations when I got to Vancouver was that this world kind of reminded me of [David Lynch\u2019s] Blue Velvet<\/a>. And he was like: \u2018Oh, I\u2019ve never seen that.\u2019 I was like: \u2018Really? You\u2019re a film-maker and you\u2019ve never seen that movie?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n But youth and inexperience can be assets, says Ejiofor: \u201cYou can have such strong ideas and such clarity of thought when you\u2019re young. There\u2019s something very exciting about somebody who is incredibly knowledgable about something and has the capacity to express it in a way that isn\u2019t convoluted, isn\u2019t confounded by this process of growing.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2018I like how the film circles around psychology\u2019 \u2026 Renate Reinsve, who plays the therapist, Mary, in Backrooms.<\/p>\n Ejiofor plays a failed architect in the film, now running a cheap furniture warehouse and even sleeping in it. Reinsve plays his therapist, who is understandably concerned when he comes to her ranting that he\u2019s found a portal to a\u00a0weird, yellow-wallpapered parallel world. She has some architecturally related emotional baggage of her own, too. They\u2019re both headed towards a conclusion that\u2019s gratifyingly off the rails and impossible to fully explain, even if you\u2019ve done your YouTube homework. There\u2019s plenty of scope to continue the story, Parsons admits: \u201cThere\u2019s a lot more space to explore there.\u201d<\/p>\n Essentially, these backrooms seem to be generated from (or possibly by) their visitors\u2019 own psyches, becoming more abstract and surreal the further visitors go \u2013 an infinite regression of copies of copies, untethered from reality, meaning, sanity. \u201cThe more times it remembers something, the less it does,\u201d says Clark, Ejiofor\u2019s character.<\/p>\n \u201cI think Kane is really scratching at something that is in a lot of people\u2019s psychology,\u201d says Ejiofor. \u201cI would come off from certain days and think: how do I think about my memory? How do I reshape events? Do I create my own sort of backrooms, these distortions of other things? Do I operate in a slightly cyclical way with minor adjustments?\u201d<\/p>\n The existential aspect appealed to Reinsve as well, \u201clike how it circles around psychology and how you can get lost in your own patterns and how difficult it is to get\u00a0free from them\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cOn an individual level, you can say this place has opened up to someone who has maybe closed themself off to every other direction and they\u2019ve been sitting still, staring at a wall for too long,\u201d Parsons says, but he also sees the backrooms as a reflection of a larger malaise, \u201ca non-space propagated by an industrial monoculture\u201d.<\/p>\n He describes them as \u201cthe obvious outcome of just everything we as a species have been doing for a long, long time \u2026 Everywhere is starting to look more and more the same, and we\u2019re drowning in information. But all that information is just turning into a cloud of noise that feels very meaningless. We\u2019re hitting a place where information about our world is getting filtered through so many systems that are inherently putting it through a blender and regurgitating it back out in a pretty distorted form.\u201d<\/p>\n What he seems to be getting at is that the built environment is already a reflection of our societal madness. The banality is evil, you could say. Others have interpreted the metaphor in terms of anything from Covid isolation to artificial intelligence to a general postmodern \u201cdeath of meaning\u201d.<\/p>\n Lukita Maxwell as Kat and Finn Bennett as Bobby in Backrooms.<\/p>\n Ejiofor sums it up neatly: \u201cI somehow get what it\u2019s saying. I can\u2019t articulate it exactly, but I feel it \u2013 and that is cinema, isn\u2019t it?\u201d<\/p>\n But not quite as we know it. The online\/gaming\/DIY film-making spaces Parsons has come from could be the jolt of life cinema needs, injecting new talent and stories into the industry. It doesn\u2019t always work: 2018\u2019s Slender Man movie tried to pull off a similar creepypasta crossover \u2013 and failed. But the YouTube pipeline has also brought in the likes of Bo Burnham (Eighth Grade<\/a>), Danny and Michael Philippou (Talk Tto Me<\/a>, Bring Her Back<\/a>) and David F Sandberg (Lights Out<\/a>, Annabelle: Creation<\/a>).<\/p>\n Parsons doesn\u2019t get hung up on format: \u201cWho gives a shit if it\u2019s a movie, if it\u2019s a TV show, if it\u2019s a video game? It\u2019s like: \u2018Here\u2019s a story. How strongly does it make you feel and pick up on these ideas that it wants to convey?\u2019\u201d His generation is accustomed to consuming stories across different media. \u201cI think that was kind of a subconscious, prevalent, just normalised thing online that I grew up with: I was more interested in the contents of\u00a0the story rather than how it was\u00a0conveyed.\u201d<\/p>\n Even if Parsons could save cinema, he might not want to. He\u2019s been quite happy doing stuff for YouTube on his own, after all. \u201cIt\u2019s sort of evolved to a place where I have no timeline and no budget and no restraints other than what I can do with a single laptop and ideally as much time as I want to put into something.\u201d<\/p>\n But in terms of film careers, you could hardly wish for a better start. Making a \u201cproper\u201d movie has given him a new appreciation for the medium, he says. \u201cI\u2019m still not the biggest cinephile, but I\u2019m not under a rock and I definitely have a lot of favourites\u201d, he says. He became especially enthused doing the sound mix for Backrooms \u201cand realising how cool the theatrical mix is compared with the near-field mix [for broadcast or streaming]. I was suddenly like: \u2018Wait a minute, I have to go into a cinema for every single thing I watch from now on.\u2019 So yes, I deeply enjoy the cinema experience.\u201d And he\u2019s only 20; plenty of time to watch Blue Velvet.<\/p>\n Backrooms is in cinemas from 29 May<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Chiwetel Ejiofor has been on a lot of movie sets, but Backrooms was something different: a 30,000\u00a0sq ft…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":960884,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3935],"tags":[77,3943,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-960883","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-movies","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116576964206809116","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/960883","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=960883"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/960883\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/960884"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=960883"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=960883"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=960883"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}