I'm very interested in seeing this movie when it comes out (the day after my birthday!) When it was announced, I set aside a whole afternoon to watch Parsons's whole YouTube series, which I found...
I'm very interested in seeing this movie when it comes out (the day after my birthday!) When it was announced, I set aside a whole afternoon to watch Parsons's whole YouTube series, which I found extremely formally interesting. YouTube has long been a really great place for aspiring/amateur filmmakers to get their reps in, and Parsons's skill as a director even from a very young age really shines through in his work on the platform.
Something interesting about the Backrooms YouTube series, that seems apparent in this teaser as well, is that with a few exceptions -- inserts of real home movie, for instance -- it's made entirely in Blender. That's part of why all the human characters wear thick hazmat suits; it's why the series uses heavy post-processing and shaky cam to create a found-footage VHS look -- and incidentally obscure any subpar modelling. What this means, though, is that Backrooms is often a purely formal exercise, with no dialogue, very little character to speak of -- just a montage from first person. This might actually be an advantage. My other favourite YouTube filmmaker, the Minecraft machinima-maker IvoryTV, often runs into problems with her period drama "Whitepine" where her dialogue drags down the whole package. She's an excellent director, composer and set-builder; episodes often go minutes without a word spoken, just image and score in a delicate, beautiful dance. But Whitepine has a narrative; even if its protagonist is autistic and would rather not talk, it needs dialogue to advance the plot, and conversation scenes often feel clunky, on-the-nose and inexpert compared to the marvelously subtle cinematography. Parsons's series doesn't have that problem; a piece of Weird YouTube fiction has no real need for character.
Backrooms uses tension really well. Given that one of the core features of the Backrooms as a concept is that its infinite, it's striking how claustrophobic the series often feels. You spend a lot of time in corridors, in rooms with bad sight lines, in vertical shafts that conjure to mind stories of stuck spelunkers. The space feels tight, closed in, labyrinthine; our protagonists have no choice but to keep moving forward nonetheless. Then, some threshold will be passed, and you'll reach a space so big that it doesn't feel interior at all: a suburban street, the exterior of a skyscraper seen through a window, a big ass service tunnel, for, what, box trucks? The claustrophobia evaporates to be replaced with a kind of bewildered awe, a shared sense of wonder with the perspective character that this is down here among all the tight corridors.
So maybe Backrooms the YouTube series is a bit of a tone poem, an archive of imagery, a ten-minute tension-release cycle on loop. It makes me curious whether the film will be the same, or whether it will have story and characters (where the series mostly has lore and videographers). How Parsons would do with a more explicit story. As the series has progressed, he's tried to give his perspective characters more of a voice, tried to be more explicit about the thematic implications of the setting, so I expect the film will continue that trend, and hopefully be a showcase for Parsons as a storyteller instead of just a director.
People have lately decried the internet version of the backrooms as ruined, over-worldbuilt, lacking the mystique of the original 4chan post (which, of course was conceptually tighter, being made up of an image and a sentence). What surprised me about Parsons's Backrooms, which is often held up as "one of the good ones," a series that "gets" the Backrooms like these internet losers don't, is that it essentially does all the same things the "bad" Backrooms stories do. It's about an SCP-esque government organization trying to categorize (and monetize) the backrooms, so it sometimes takes the tone of a qualitative study. It heavily features monsters in all three of the major "features" in the series (which feature hapless protagonists falling into the backrooms, stumbling around searching them, and then dying with their camcorders left behind for, presumably, the feds to find -- this opposed to the more anthology-esque interstitial installments focusing on the government). By my completely unfounded estimate the majority of "entities" and "levels" that others catalog in Backrooms webfiction are just directly ripped from imagery dreamed up by Parsons. He is essentially the progenitor of the modern Backrooms -- just, he's also a good enough director that all the potentially corny, over-the-top elements feel earned, even dreadful, in context.
One could probably do an interesting study about the role of the monster, which varies in each of the three Parsons films. Every labyrinth needs its minotaur; the way Parsons uses his minotaurs evolves and matures as the years pass, from the first film where the monster is a final jumpscare, a Cookie Monster-esque "monster at the end of this book," a final explosion of all the built-up tension, to the third film where the monster stalks the protagonists for almost the whole forty-five minute runtime, becoming just a part of the tension-release cycle, an integrated part of the Backrooms that forces the perspective character to push deeper into it and, at least on some level, understand it.
If you have like four hours to set aside I really encourage you to just sit down and watch the whole YouTube series. It's surprisingly hard on a slow attention span, slow and methodical (given it was made by a Zoomer) but it's really rewarding to watch -- not only because of the story you get to unfold, but because you can also fell Parsons evolve and mature behind the "camera."
As a casual fan of Backrooms lore and Kane Pixels' YouTube series in general I'm pretty excited for this one. It'll be interesting to see how "dumbed down" for general audiences it ends up being....
As a casual fan of Backrooms lore and Kane Pixels' YouTube series in general I'm pretty excited for this one. It'll be interesting to see how "dumbed down" for general audiences it ends up being. As it stands now I trust both Kane Pixels and A24 so I have pretty high expectations.
I'm vaguely aware of "backrooms" (not capitalized) vibes as an unsettling psychological horror concept based on wandering through neverending labyrinths of creepy abandoned "liminal spaces" that...
I'm vaguely aware of "backrooms" (not capitalized) vibes as an unsettling psychological horror concept based on wandering through neverending labyrinths of creepy abandoned "liminal spaces" that tend to look like stuffy '70s-'90s offices, homes, hotels, indoor swimming pools, etc. That's pretty much the whole notion of it that exists in my head.
Is it a proper name now? There's lore? Who owns it? Are there established characters and a plot we should expect the movie to follow?
I'm only tangentially aware of it (mostly through my kids), but I believe the lore has been built in a similar fashion to SCP (if you're familiar), where it's more of a collaborative phenomenon...
I'm only tangentially aware of it (mostly through my kids), but I believe the lore has been built in a similar fashion to SCP (if you're familiar), where it's more of a collaborative phenomenon consisting of various wikis (like this one), forums, and creative output (lots of YouTube videos) where anyone can contribute to the lore, and some of it ends up being more popular than others and kind of bubbles up to form a shared "canon."
The director of this movie, Kane Parsons (aka Kane Pixels), has a YouTube channel where he created what are arguably the most widely known and influential Backrooms videos where I think he basically hand-selected various bits of that collective lore and worked them into his videos, as well as creating some of his own lore hinted at in the videos (which themselves then made their way into other videos, forums, wikis, etc.)
Possible spoilers for the movie? I dunno...
My birds-eye understanding of the lore is there is an institute called the Async Research Institute (which I think may have been invented by Kane), which is who the guys in yellow hazmat suits work for, if you've ever seen them come up in Backrooms videos. The Backrooms have always existed, and it has been possible to shift out of our reality and become trapped in them for a long time, but Async figured out some way to open stable portals into them, and has been doing experiments in order to test the commercial viability of the Backrooms (for example as a source of essentially unlimited cheap storage space, real estate, stuff like that).
My understanding is that there are sort of two divergent and conflicting "lore sets" for the Backrooms--one that mostly paints them as an infinite liminal space devoid of life, basically a distorted echo of reality (along the lines of what's explored in the book Piranesi by Susanne Clarke), and one that includes a variety of "entities" that are native to and inhabit the Backrooms, which is what a lot of the Backrooms-themed games are based on (where you need to know and follow the rules of how to interact with or escape from the entities). I think both lore sets agree there are different "levels" of the Backrooms, of which the yellow wallpapered office type area is just one.
Kane Pixels' videos kind of live in a middle ground I think--the Backrooms are mostly uninhabited, but he's shown (or maybe also invented?) at least one of the entities in some of his videos. I think to date he's only shown the yellow office level, so it's unclear to me if his personal lore includes the different levels aspect or not.
For me, it's very similar to the SCP universe, where the concept is really cool and can be liminal/creepy if you're only tangentially aware of the large body of lore that's been built up, but as soon as you start looking at the specifics there's so much stupid stuff in there it kind of ruins everything. So I haven't really drilled too deep into the Backrooms lore outside of hearing about some of the stuff my kids talk about.
No-one owns it, but Kane "Pixels" Parsons, a young filmmaker, made a series of shorts on Youtube a few years ago, which formed a sort of communal lore background. I find it really nice because it...
No-one owns it, but Kane "Pixels" Parsons, a young filmmaker, made a series of shorts on Youtube a few years ago, which formed a sort of communal lore background. I find it really nice because it shows an interesting worldbuilding without any over-exposition or semblance of explanation.
Then on top (or on side) of that, many people made their own versions of the backrooms with all sorts of "levels" (sort of... biomes?), "entities" (monsters), "rules" to abide and survive, etc. Younger folks seem to like that, it's soft horror games and videos. I prefer the "less is more" aspect that Parsons built.
An inherent problem with this kind of horror is striking the balance between providing an answer/satisfying resolution and threat. I think House of Leaves was a FANTASTIC way to mess with this,...
An inherent problem with this kind of horror is striking the balance between providing an answer/satisfying resolution and threat.
I think House of Leaves was a FANTASTIC way to mess with this, but you could also have stuck more on the "survival" side of things of just wandering this endless liminal landscape.
I would hope this doesn't devolve into "crazy guy chasing people to kill them" but that seems to be the standard copy paste script for when the novelty runs out.
I'm very interested in seeing this movie when it comes out (the day after my birthday!) When it was announced, I set aside a whole afternoon to watch Parsons's whole YouTube series, which I found extremely formally interesting. YouTube has long been a really great place for aspiring/amateur filmmakers to get their reps in, and Parsons's skill as a director even from a very young age really shines through in his work on the platform.
Something interesting about the Backrooms YouTube series, that seems apparent in this teaser as well, is that with a few exceptions -- inserts of real home movie, for instance -- it's made entirely in Blender. That's part of why all the human characters wear thick hazmat suits; it's why the series uses heavy post-processing and shaky cam to create a found-footage VHS look -- and incidentally obscure any subpar modelling. What this means, though, is that Backrooms is often a purely formal exercise, with no dialogue, very little character to speak of -- just a montage from first person. This might actually be an advantage. My other favourite YouTube filmmaker, the Minecraft machinima-maker IvoryTV, often runs into problems with her period drama "Whitepine" where her dialogue drags down the whole package. She's an excellent director, composer and set-builder; episodes often go minutes without a word spoken, just image and score in a delicate, beautiful dance. But Whitepine has a narrative; even if its protagonist is autistic and would rather not talk, it needs dialogue to advance the plot, and conversation scenes often feel clunky, on-the-nose and inexpert compared to the marvelously subtle cinematography. Parsons's series doesn't have that problem; a piece of Weird YouTube fiction has no real need for character.
Backrooms uses tension really well. Given that one of the core features of the Backrooms as a concept is that its infinite, it's striking how claustrophobic the series often feels. You spend a lot of time in corridors, in rooms with bad sight lines, in vertical shafts that conjure to mind stories of stuck spelunkers. The space feels tight, closed in, labyrinthine; our protagonists have no choice but to keep moving forward nonetheless. Then, some threshold will be passed, and you'll reach a space so big that it doesn't feel interior at all: a suburban street, the exterior of a skyscraper seen through a window, a big ass service tunnel, for, what, box trucks? The claustrophobia evaporates to be replaced with a kind of bewildered awe, a shared sense of wonder with the perspective character that this is down here among all the tight corridors.
So maybe Backrooms the YouTube series is a bit of a tone poem, an archive of imagery, a ten-minute tension-release cycle on loop. It makes me curious whether the film will be the same, or whether it will have story and characters (where the series mostly has lore and videographers). How Parsons would do with a more explicit story. As the series has progressed, he's tried to give his perspective characters more of a voice, tried to be more explicit about the thematic implications of the setting, so I expect the film will continue that trend, and hopefully be a showcase for Parsons as a storyteller instead of just a director.
People have lately decried the internet version of the backrooms as ruined, over-worldbuilt, lacking the mystique of the original 4chan post (which, of course was conceptually tighter, being made up of an image and a sentence). What surprised me about Parsons's Backrooms, which is often held up as "one of the good ones," a series that "gets" the Backrooms like these internet losers don't, is that it essentially does all the same things the "bad" Backrooms stories do. It's about an SCP-esque government organization trying to categorize (and monetize) the backrooms, so it sometimes takes the tone of a qualitative study. It heavily features monsters in all three of the major "features" in the series (which feature hapless protagonists falling into the backrooms, stumbling around searching them, and then dying with their camcorders left behind for, presumably, the feds to find -- this opposed to the more anthology-esque interstitial installments focusing on the government). By my completely unfounded estimate the majority of "entities" and "levels" that others catalog in Backrooms webfiction are just directly ripped from imagery dreamed up by Parsons. He is essentially the progenitor of the modern Backrooms -- just, he's also a good enough director that all the potentially corny, over-the-top elements feel earned, even dreadful, in context.
One could probably do an interesting study about the role of the monster, which varies in each of the three Parsons films. Every labyrinth needs its minotaur; the way Parsons uses his minotaurs evolves and matures as the years pass, from the first film where the monster is a final jumpscare, a Cookie Monster-esque "monster at the end of this book," a final explosion of all the built-up tension, to the third film where the monster stalks the protagonists for almost the whole forty-five minute runtime, becoming just a part of the tension-release cycle, an integrated part of the Backrooms that forces the perspective character to push deeper into it and, at least on some level, understand it.
If you have like four hours to set aside I really encourage you to just sit down and watch the whole YouTube series. It's surprisingly hard on a slow attention span, slow and methodical (given it was made by a Zoomer) but it's really rewarding to watch -- not only because of the story you get to unfold, but because you can also fell Parsons evolve and mature behind the "camera."
As a casual fan of Backrooms lore and Kane Pixels' YouTube series in general I'm pretty excited for this one. It'll be interesting to see how "dumbed down" for general audiences it ends up being. As it stands now I trust both Kane Pixels and A24 so I have pretty high expectations.
I'm vaguely aware of "backrooms" (not capitalized) vibes as an unsettling psychological horror concept based on wandering through neverending labyrinths of creepy abandoned "liminal spaces" that tend to look like stuffy '70s-'90s offices, homes, hotels, indoor swimming pools, etc. That's pretty much the whole notion of it that exists in my head.
Is it a proper name now? There's lore? Who owns it? Are there established characters and a plot we should expect the movie to follow?
I'm only tangentially aware of it (mostly through my kids), but I believe the lore has been built in a similar fashion to SCP (if you're familiar), where it's more of a collaborative phenomenon consisting of various wikis (like this one), forums, and creative output (lots of YouTube videos) where anyone can contribute to the lore, and some of it ends up being more popular than others and kind of bubbles up to form a shared "canon."
The director of this movie, Kane Parsons (aka Kane Pixels), has a YouTube channel where he created what are arguably the most widely known and influential Backrooms videos where I think he basically hand-selected various bits of that collective lore and worked them into his videos, as well as creating some of his own lore hinted at in the videos (which themselves then made their way into other videos, forums, wikis, etc.)
My understanding is that there are sort of two divergent and conflicting "lore sets" for the Backrooms--one that mostly paints them as an infinite liminal space devoid of life, basically a distorted echo of reality (along the lines of what's explored in the book Piranesi by Susanne Clarke), and one that includes a variety of "entities" that are native to and inhabit the Backrooms, which is what a lot of the Backrooms-themed games are based on (where you need to know and follow the rules of how to interact with or escape from the entities). I think both lore sets agree there are different "levels" of the Backrooms, of which the yellow wallpapered office type area is just one.
Kane Pixels' videos kind of live in a middle ground I think--the Backrooms are mostly uninhabited, but he's shown (or maybe also invented?) at least one of the entities in some of his videos. I think to date he's only shown the yellow office level, so it's unclear to me if his personal lore includes the different levels aspect or not.
For me, it's very similar to the SCP universe, where the concept is really cool and can be liminal/creepy if you're only tangentially aware of the large body of lore that's been built up, but as soon as you start looking at the specifics there's so much stupid stuff in there it kind of ruins everything. So I haven't really drilled too deep into the Backrooms lore outside of hearing about some of the stuff my kids talk about.
No-one owns it, but Kane "Pixels" Parsons, a young filmmaker, made a series of shorts on Youtube a few years ago, which formed a sort of communal lore background. I find it really nice because it shows an interesting worldbuilding without any over-exposition or semblance of explanation.
I encourage you to watch the whole series https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4dGpz6cnHo&list=PLVAh-MgDVqvDUEq6qDXqORBioE4Yhol_z
Then on top (or on side) of that, many people made their own versions of the backrooms with all sorts of "levels" (sort of... biomes?), "entities" (monsters), "rules" to abide and survive, etc. Younger folks seem to like that, it's soft horror games and videos. I prefer the "less is more" aspect that Parsons built.
An inherent problem with this kind of horror is striking the balance between providing an answer/satisfying resolution and threat.
I think House of Leaves was a FANTASTIC way to mess with this, but you could also have stuck more on the "survival" side of things of just wandering this endless liminal landscape.
I would hope this doesn't devolve into "crazy guy chasing people to kill them" but that seems to be the standard copy paste script for when the novelty runs out.