“Are you helping me or are you going on and on?” – Homer Simpson
“Oh, right, and of course within we find the, uh, doomed individual.” – Prof. Frink
[Note: a discussion of the ending of the movie is at the end of this post.]
Having been largely shielded from the internet discussion of Backrooms, I went into the film and my subsequent reading of its Wikipedia page as a mostly blank slate. I had completely forgotten the “Backrooms” internet meme, but as a premise for a horror movie it’s a great one. What is this image if not an unintentional movie poster:
There’s nothing inherently wrong with building a movie around a poster, but I’m not sure you can, as the Wikipedia page suggests, build a web series, a feature film, and a potential television series around a poster. The film itself keeps the audience on edge with plenty of mood and tension, effectively using the repetitive but creepy settings for background dread and active scares. It works as a horror movie from start to finish and I saw it in a packed theater with a crowd that was dialed in.
But . . . the Stranger Things vibe is unavoidable. Weird creepy places that eerily mirror our own are always more interesting the less we know about them and Backrooms wants to fix that. The terrifying pirate captain who seems to be an id of trauma come to life is actually a creature that some scientists are trying to gas. The film closes with exposition from Phil the Science Guy about there being more doors opening up into MRI World, about how he’s gonna have to figure it out, and like, please don’t? As a meme and a horror movie this works best without explanation. One fears for the film’s monster; will it, like the Demogorgon on Stranger Things, be reduced from terrifying to henchman as the content piles up?
Sitting in the theater as the credits rolled, I was giving it way too much thought, wondering about grand metaphors of trauma echoing through generations, but no, it seems to be they want to keep exploring and and looking for answers. There will be some thrills to be had as they do, but sequels, prequels, and other properties will never match the unknown depths of this one, the soul deep dread of staring into something bottomless within yourself starts to wear off pretty quickly once you know that what’s really behind the walls are people who want to charge you to keep visiting.
Damn, good to have you back.