Greetings my mighty loyalist,
To offer some reprieve from the Kickstarter, I have some opinions. Opinions on The Backrooms.
I have been a huge Wendigoon follower for nearly four years now. By extension, I have been a huge Kane Pixels follower for nearly four years now. Kane has been creating intense visual youtube shorts since his young teenage years. And to incredible success as now he is only 20 years old and has a blockbuster hit. I’m talking of course about The Backrooms. But i’m not done talking about Kane, just yet.
Kane Parsons/Pixels (YouTube)
The Backrooms as a movie, is derived from Kane’s youtube series by the same name. However, Kane has made many other youtube horrors. These are in a genre called, Analog Horror because of their analog aesthetics. With this medium, Kane has two massive gauntlets to brawl with. One being the special effects, and the other being an incredible forethought on story-telling using new concepts.
So Kane obviously works with others but has been the primary juggernaut of his own special effects. For most of the visuals in the backrooms and other series, he uses blender. Blender is a software for 3-D environment and asset creation. Kane has mastered this software blending (haha) it with the analog style of old VHS recording and real world environments. There are also many compelling shots, environments, actors, illustrations, etc involved with these videos. It is truly incredible.
The other gauntlet, his story-telling, is just as amazing. There is a plethora of lore and world-building being manifested in every series. The Backrooms is ongoing, but you can take a look at The Oldest View to see something very intrinsic yet new to the soul. Obviously, it’s also just horrifying. Throughout Kane’s productions are many intentional hints. Not a lot is spoon fed, but with some inspection you start to feel puzzles being put together. It’s a very fun process. So, please, go check out Kane’s work at the link below and watch some original Backrooms. (After that go check out Wendigoon’s video on unpacking what you just watched with some theories!)
Kane Pixels Youtube
The Backrooms (Spoilers)
Now, as stated above, The Backrooms as a movie is derived from the on-going Backrooms youtube series. That, but it is also a piece of the youtube series. Do not get me wrong, it stands really well by-itself, but there is a lot to watch outside of it if you want to know more of the story, and it is important to know going into watch it and review it.
The opening scene is a found footage piece showing the backrooms being surveilled by strange workers in a hazmat adjacent suits. One was separated and trying to get back, but then faces something in the hallways.
Our first broad section of the movie is setting up some of our characters. Clark a furniture store owner, Mary the therapist, and Bobby and Kat, Clark’s assistants. You get to know the troubles and see vague flashbacks of these characters. It’s nothing too out there weird, but it’s not all obvious. This makes for a nice preheat of the oven for the cake that comes later.
The next section is Clark’s store having strange electrical issues, and for reasons, he has to stay overnight. He soon discovers that in the basement there is a strange glitch-like issue with one of his walls. He discovers he can enter the backrooms. He doesn’t know what this is though. No one knows what this is, but like the familiarity the backrooms is supposed to evoke, he understands that there are walls, furniture, paths, rooms, and doors. It logically seems like a hidden structure under the ground. From this point forward, the pace and tension really starts to escalate.
My favorite part of the movie begins with Kat and Bobby joining Clark on an excursion into this weird liminal place. Clark is trying to map out this strange interior, and Bobby brings his camera so that Clark can prove everything that they are seeing. However, this is where a more horrific turn takes place, and the group run into an entity born of the backrooms. This part is so fun because the camera utilizes the found footage part that the youtube series started with. I know that found footage has become something of a meme and nuisance to some viewers, but just like any tool, it can be the right tool at the right times. This obscures what is happening and what is being seen and limits the shot to one immersive experience. Not too shaky, and a great mix-up to the cinematic view. The tension and fear really works here!
We do not get to learn exactly what happens after the chaos takes over, but we switch back to Mary. Mary being associated to the flashbacks that first took place starts to make more sense with small reveals here and there. She gets curious about a strange message Clark left on her voice-mail and begins to search. Investigating the store she too stumbles into the Backrooms. She finds Clark still alive, and after some complications they have another therapy session. Mary, in a hostile situation and not on the clock, let her therapist mask slip. This session really digs into both of them, letting out what they most wanted to say. In this scene, though, you get to see humanoid “memories” of people that are spawning in The Backrooms. I won’t give a whole lot away, but just know they’re present here.
After their outbursts, a large entity steps into the room, and this has to be my biggest low point of the movie. The looming creature was some giant morphed caricature of Clark in his pirate outfit. This being something that Clark befriended after his last excursion. It decides to kill Clark here, and give chase to Mary. Now if you watch the youtube series you quickly come to understand there are things to fear inside the Backrooms. They’re not common, but seem to be dangerous. They are also, not clear. You cannot tell what these things are, and that adds a lot of gravitas to their presence. Even looking at them straight on, you’re trying to see what connects where. So seeing what essentially was a 3 meter titan in a pirate outfit was not the best reveal in my opinion.
Even so, the chase that follows is still very tense and fun utilizing more of the Backrooms corridors and strange architectures. The chase ends after Mary confronts the entity and is rescued by some of the initial hazmat workers. You come to find out that these investigators work for a company called Async.
Mary undergoes an Async cognitive analysis after her experience so that they may come to gather more information on the strange place. The movie ends here with a bit of a question as to Mary’s well-being and that a misshapen copy of her is manifesting in the strange complex.
My Take Away and Review
I did not really expect to give you the above synopsis, but this whole thing really needs context. It is like watching a random episode of Game of Thrones and expecting to understand everything and know everyone.
So, I already said it. I loved this movie. Again, this is not a spoon fed experience, but it is an experience. The concept is fun and compelling, the characters are established pretty well given their temporary nature, and the larger scope of this becomes apparent by the end. Most importantly, as someone who already kind of had an expectation, the fear was there.
There is something very ingrained in me as a product of the 20th and 21st century being alone in large hallways. Lost in the department store. Unfamiliar but familiar places. Remembering something but not fully with a since of strange nostalgia. All this while understanding that I am by myself but not alone. And once a thing makes itself known, needing to leave this familiar place at once. This is where the concept can shine with a chase scene. As any one person feels pressured, they start to inadvertently explore the uncharted waters, straying farther and farther away from escape. Every chase puts you on edge and you just felt a part of the victim’s experiments in opening strange doors and crouching through narrow corridors. This movie really utilized tension in these scenes.
The story of the characters was alright. I feel that perhaps there was a parallel to be made between Clark being lost in the backrooms to him being lost in his own soul. That he is trying to navigate both of them too trepidatiously, and making a maze of it all while the danger, or the truth, is always lurking in his heart and in the halls. The truth is hard to face, and is scary, until he ultimately accepts it.
Conversely, Mary got to share a home with her mother. It was nice and fun in the beginning, however, her mother had struggled with, or succumbed to, a mental illness. Mary was ultimately trapped in her childhood home like a strange prison. This prison becoming very familiar, yet she grew out of it and sought to seek other people’s prisons as a therapist. Also paralleled, maybe, in her exploration for Clark and ending up in a different form of prison.
But that’s just a theory. I think other people tend to come up with more accurate depictions of these abstract parts of movies. Mine are usually completely off base. There are pieces to the story like the concrete hand print that Mary carries with her. A relic to her old home that got demolished probably because of the poor state it turned into. It was a reminder that she bashed over the head of titan Clark until it crumbled. I know there’s some symbolism there, but I just don’t know what it would be in a way that ties back to the themes I explored. (I have trouble with things like themes.) Especially as they are personal to a character, and that character does not seem to have much of an impact on the entire concept of The Complex as a whole.
The best part had to be the found footage piece. Just as a horror aspect that really shined in this concept. It was well shot, well directed, and just a nice climatic piece of the movie.
Finally, I wanted to touch on the bad parts that stuck out to me, and I already dabbled on it earlier. The monster reveal had to be the let down of the century. Now I’ve already said that Kane has a hard right hook in story telling, so I’m certain that he and the A24 studios came to an agreement on this aspect being our big bad for a reason. It’s thematically a part of Clark. It’s thematically a part of how the Backrooms and the Complex manifest memories or emotions in uncanny ways. It also falls so very short of what the Youtube series had been establishing since episode one. When you see the things in the youtube series -known as the lifeforms– , you kind of have an expectation that these creative minds will be able to make them scarier, cooler, and more complex antagonists than what Kane did by himself on a dime budget. So the titan doppelgänger Clark was not necessarily bad, but it was pretty lame in comparison.
Alright. This review has been a lot more than anticipated, but I give this movie an 8/10! It was nice to see something outside of the norm, it maintained my engagement and thought, and it succeeded as a horror offering a realm of fear and tension. However, I think it could have been scarier at a fundamental level.
Please go give Kane’s projects on youtube a look, shout out to Wendigoon for introducing me to this world, and thank you all so much for reading.
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