"Backrooms" Succeeds

Well they brought in the cavalry for the newest horror hit. Produced by James Wan, Osgood Perkins, and Atomic Monster, among many others, distributed by powerhouse studio A24, and directed by Kane Parsons, the man who brought us the original Backrooms YouTube series. It would be futile to try to list the entire resume of this coalition.  So, does the resulting product mirror this excessive firepower?

Well, not exactly, but it’s still pretty darn good. To be honest, what I expected going into this film was something akin to A24’s previous horror films, but in yellow this time. Instead, we got a movie that takes the old school approach of trying to creep you out with chilling atmosphere more than anything else. That approach is as ancient as film itself, going back to the Universal monster classics and even farther back to the 1920s German expressionist films. There’s no question that there are parallels between this film and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.  But those parallels aren’t just visual, they’re also substantive.  Specifically, the underlying current of mental illness that fuels the narrative from behind-the-scenes – or should I say, from the backrooms.

To fully explain how this film expounds on the theme of mental illness would be to spoil key elements of the narrative, but suffice it to say that our main character, Clark, has an interesting reaction to the backrooms. At first, it’s the same as everybody else’s reaction would be: befuddlement and fear.  But as he becomes more familiar with the backrooms, they become almost sort of an escape.  He’s never unafraid of what lies within those walls, but he contrasts it to his personal life in the “real world,” and finds an escape.  In the end, this approach doesn’t quite work out, and that’s all I’ll say.  Nevertheless it feels like enough to point out how, like a certain bacteria monster, psychological issues fester when put in a proverbial petri dish.  Isolate them from the outside world and suddenly they grow exponentially.  This idea has been explored not only in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari but numerous other horror classics like The Shining and A24’s own Hereditary.  It’s no coincidence that our second main character, Mary, had a mother who completely blocked her from the outside world as a child, and the fact that Mary must escape multiple times throughout the film to find answers.

Another way this film succeeds is with its representation.  Clark is a black man and Mary is a woman.  In 2026, this isn’t exactly a shining beacon of diversity, but it is strong representation in an era where it is sorely needed.  With how (shockingly) young the audience for this movie skews, having a black man and a woman in positions of prominence sends a message to our youth that you don’t have to be a particular skin color or gender to play a pivotal role in a film of any genre.

Audiences should be warned going in to this film that it is slow.  Which does make perfect sense, considering basically every YouTube video of the backrooms, whether made by Kane Parsons or not, runs like molasses, and purposefully so. It adds to the atmosphere. But I wonder if it was totally necessary to be just as slow in the scenes that take place outside of the backrooms, where the threat of impending doom does not occupy the audience.

Beyond that, this film is super creative visually, which it kind of had to be to achieve what it sought to achieve. Obviously the set design and the way that props are arranged takes the cake here, but there are also some really interesting camera angles, specifically where the action is viewed from below. The acting is about the same as in any A24 horror film, which is getting a little stale but is sufficient at this juncture. The scene-by-scene action plays out about the same as in any horror film, but that’s probably fine, given the difficulty of turning a single JPG into a whole movie.

I recommend Backrooms.  It’s not going to scare you as much as Obsession, nor is it quite as profound, but I think the two films compliment each other.  I especially recommend it if you’re a fan of Parsons’ YouTube series, as it does everything it can to stay true to that original vision.  It’s a competently made movie with something important to say and bursting with an approach to horror we rarely see these days.