The story of Backrooms is incredible. An image posted anonymously on 4Chan backed in 2019 gave birth to an internet legend about a strange liminal space comprising a maze of empty rooms with yellowish wallpaper. Communities sprang up on Reddit dedicated to what became a folk legend, continuing long after the location of the original photo was tracked down to an abandoned furniture store in Wisconsin.
In 2022, a 16-year-old Kane Parsons taught himself how to use the free animation software Blender and posted a short Backrooms film on YouTube. Four years later, his feature-length movie has grossed $118 million worldwide during its opening weekend – on a budget of just $10 million.
Wonderfully, Kane's original series of Backrooms shorts (there are 24 in total) remain on YouTube today. And watching them now after seeing the feature film, they feel even creepier and more unsettling than before.
Kane's first Backrooms movie was a nine-minute short posted on YouTube as found footage. It was simple and cost barely anything to make, yet it combines so many primitive human fears, of being alone, lost in the unknown, trapped, that it was as powerful as a big-budget horror.
In interviews, the director has spoken of how he was using short online Blender tutorials to learn the software and trying to rip assets from Half-Life when he began experimenting with the film. Some of the workflow he developed has survived the evolution of Backrooms to a full-blown movie.
Although the feature film uses practical sets and actors, the director still used Blender to design them. The 3D models were used to create real-world blueprints, set designs and furniture choices with art director Danny Vermette. Kane's described doing "50 wallpaper tests" to get just the right shade of yellow.
The movie is a phenomenal achievement, but paradoxically it's made the original YouTube shorts feel creepier, and added to them a new meta dimension. The cinematic version, produced by A24, delivers a polished, expansive take on Backrooms with professional lighting and sound design, and a more developed narrative structure with characters and lore. That inevitably loses some of the rawness of the YouTube original.
The original Backrooms feels like something stumbled on by accident; more cursed video rather than a scripted film. The brevity of the videos feels more ambiguous, and more dangerous, because of the lack of context, without the actors to anchor us. The absence of narrative makes the viewer project their own fears into the void, amplifying the unease.
And now that the Hollywood movie has become such a massive hit, these original ultra-low budget masterpieces take on a new elegiac quality. They was shot like documentary footage. Now they are documentary footage; exhibits of past iterations and experiments in the making of blockbuster movie.
For more of the week's movie news, see the controversy over the Toy Story 5 plagiarism accusations.
