i was devastated when the only hot guy in the film died. also why did they keep going further in
3.5/5 
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The part that had me questioning was that the guy owns a furniture store and he finds a place that generates infinite free furniture and he didn’t take more of an advantage of that.
I liked it. After glancing through various wikipedia pages, I concluded that the movie was about liminal spaces, in-between spaces, not-quite-there-yet spaces, but it’s also about liminal people. The MC is a divorced alcoholic failing small business owner wannabe architect who has no friends or family, only a couple of employees and a therapist, whose only relationships are money relationships—not a full person. The therapist is traumatized from growing up in a backrooms-like environment with her mentally sick mother who eventually got committed, and has found some success in her writing but still feels empty (running away from her own book launch party to pop some kind of pill), and is likewise unable to help or cure her client, who can barely bother to show up to their sessions on time. Her childhood home, all that’s seemingly left of her mother, was destroyed in order to make room for an office building. These are liminal people.
Even outside the backrooms, the environments we see are fairly dead, and hardly better than their backrooms equivalents: the outside of a huge (yet mostly empty) shopping center (which is about pirates but also an ottoman empire, an orientalist mishmash that makes little sense in its own liminal way), a few subdivisions where no one seems to be around, plus what seemed like a hotel converted into low-income housing? The whole world here is liminal. Even the employees are forced to suspend whatever they were doing in their home (fucking, producing offspring, the only thing the proletariat is good for according to the etymology of the term?) to literally kill themselves for a wage in the backrooms. Theseus here is “the hot guy” with the “End Apartheid” shirt, come to free the slaves trapped in the labyrinth, but because he’s no longer a prince, but a wage earner, Ariadne and Daedalus (with his ball of string / rope) can’t help him.
It was pretty obvious to connect this to the labyrinth, with the minotaur likewise being an incomplete liminal person, with the body of a man and the head of a bull, a petite bourgeois with his feet among the proletariat while his head is in the clouds with haute bourgeois billionaires.
Someone also needs to say something about the racial dynamics in the film. The main character is a black petite bourgeois. No one in the film says a word about him being black. The film could have been made with a white actor in his place, and the script could have been the same. Why did the filmmakers choose to make the main character black (especially in our current anti-woke reaction period) and why then did the film seemingly say nothing about race, aside from seemingly being against apartheid? The white male worker has better politics than the black male petite bourgeois…
The movie made me think of The Shining, Cube, Being John Malkovich, Us, Get Out, and others. All of these movies are kind of riffing on these themes.
As a critique of capitalism, the film shows something terrifying to the proletariat: a small business owner on the rampage inside endless inescapable office space that has been created for profit, not use. These kinds of empty office spaces are frightening because no one is there, only our unconscious bourgeois shadow people can fill them, but beautiful natural environments were devastated to build them, communities were bulldozed for them, and workers went there to kill their dreams in exchange for a wage (before losing their jobs to automation, offshoring, stock market collapses, etc.). They’re the latest iteration of the enclosure of the commons: instead of replacing people with sheep for profit, we’re replacing people with office space for profit, especially on the cusp of the nineties dotcom boom. The film is likewise set in San Jose / Silicon Valley, but could have been set almost anywhere. It’s also not coincidental that this creepypasta became popular at the beginning of the pandemic, when returning to the office (to be terrorized by middle manager half-people) could literally mean losing your life.
Theseus here is “the hot guy” with the “End Apartheid” shirt, come to free the slaves trapped in the labyrinth, but because he’s no longer a prince, but a wage earner, Ariadne and Daedalus (with his ball of string / rope) can’t help him.
holy shit lol i thought at first you were just shitposting but when i got to this part i literally went
(also does anyone know the emoji code we have for this i couldn’t find it)Does the emoji mean what I wrote was good or bad 😑
it’s popular streamer iShowSpeed nodding in agreement; which means that it made sense to me, so good
Good 😎
noo, not the don’t laugh one, we used to have this one as a emoji too
What if instead of backrooms it was shaqrooms and they inadvertently kept walking into rooms in shaqs house (like a teleportation kinda deal). He’s all like “ get outta here!” so they do but when they walk through the door - boom - they’re in a different room in shaqs house and so on and so forth
Yakkety Shaq
The main message of backrooms is that small business owners are the true monster
5.8/10
keep going further in …
I mean the movie wasn’t called frontrooms, or most-of-the-way-rooms. Apparently there’s rooms in the back and that’s what the movie Is about.
I have not seen the movie, and have no idea what the whole concept is so none of this means anything to me.
the backrooms was an internet story about accidentally clipping through the world and winding up in an endless series of hallways and offices. Now it’s got a bunch of offshoot stories with monsters and stuff
To be fair, the original post had monsters too, it just didn’t go into any detail about them because the idea was to be a spooky, evocative micro-fiction rather than having L O R E
Oh right, they were more of an ominous presence, weren’t they?
It’s been a while
Yeah, here’s the text of the original post:
If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms, where it’s nothing but the stink of old, moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in
God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you
why did they keep going further in
what if Yellow Parenti was just around the corner? would you ever forgive yourself for not going just a little bit further?
I’d keep going until I knew what was happening to the timber, the flax, the hemp, the cocoa, the rum, the tin, the copper, the iron, the rubber, the bauxite, the slaves, and the cheap labor, and I wouldn’t rest until I learned that my country is not underdeveloped, but rather overexploited
what if Yellow Parenti was just around the corner?
Everything in the backrooms is a warped, misremembered version of itself. So you find Yellow Parenti, and are horrified to discover that he’s a liberal
A horror story for Americans:
You, a very divorced failing small business tyrant, find out you actually had basically unlimited free real estate this whole time. And you didn’t capitalise on it.
also why did they keep going further in
What? Are you going to ignore this… manifestation of destiny? This strange and empty land? This “terra nullius”? Why wouldn’t you go further? Should Alexander stop right before his troops were tired and homesick? Should Napoleon stop right before Russia in autumn? Should Paul Bunyan stop right before cutting down an ancient and sacred grove inhabited by Ents?
I did think, as soon as he found the pile of stools the first time he stepped through the wall, was that he should have been like: “hell yeah, free stools!” And he should have tried to sell them. And he should have only gone inside the backrooms to get free furniture to sell, and should have just ignored everything else about them. And also tried to rent them out, having zero interest of any kind as to why they were there. He could have called the police on the “entities” and claimed all the backrooms for himself.
And also tried to rent them out
This is part of the premise of the videos on Youtube on which the movie is based. You have this ridiculous operation tearing a hole through reality and one of the main given motives is literally using the alternate dimension as a rented storage space.
i was devastated when the only hot guy in the film died
Speaking of the hot guy, chat is it Gay if it’s in the backrooms? 👀
i was devastated when the only hot guy in the film died
It is nessecary to sacrifice at least one hot guy to the backrooms minotaur
also why did they keep going further in
he is exactly where he wants to be, dont save him lol
he is exactly where he wants to be, dont save him lol
i meant that more in scope of the other characters. Like there was no reason for Bobby to go down the slope, go
at all the clothes and say “ugh smells bad in here” and be like “okay :D let me go further to the very end of the rope for no reason”His girlfriend running off in search of him when he got dragged away, sure I can buy that in the moment but the entire time they were down there as a group I was like “just turn around you got the proof you need/wanted with the video-camera why are you all collectively deciding to explore more” and yeah, he’s down there cause he likes it there - that became evident to me when he was like “dang bobby’s dead and my other employee just presumably ran off to her death. can’t forget the camera though :D”
If I’m the therapist though and my patient has already come to me freaking out about the rooms, I am NOT going past that damn threshold more than once. Oh I got in?? Cool, this validates his belief in my eyes, let me leave a “hey just stopped by, come to the office when you want to talk about this!! completely believe you now” note and turn my ass around!!
I don’t need to keep going further past the weird ass reversed Stop sign and the subsequent cardboard cut-out with the Voyager “Hellos from earth” audio playing from a wired speaker attached to it.
It is nessecary to sacrifice at least one hot guy to the backrooms minotaur
just wait until you see how many hot guys get sacrificed in the sequel, The Backshots
I quite liked it. Perhaps it’s a little surface-level, but the theme of needing to want to change for it to actually happen was personally resonant. Also showing how trying to accept that you won’t change and persisting in your self-destructive habits is just going to lead to destruction.
Perhaps it’s a little surface-level
Idk, I thought it was as deep as it needed to be, in order to be effective. We have characters with enough conflict and motivation to explore the spooky room dimension, and care about what happens there.
Plus, the script made really satisfying use of Chekhov’s Gun, multiple times.
Was it good as a horror movie?
I wouldn’t even call it a horror movie more like a psychological thriller
My take is that it was… okay? I said to my friend it felt ‘competent’ but I wasn’t blown away. Think of the first season of Severance aesthetic, set design and frame blocking (praiseworthy) but rather the corporate intrigue and pseudophilosophy it’s just the main protag walking through spoopy rooms with some psychoanalysis tacked on. There’s some shaky cam a la blair witch which was fun
Sounds like your standard creepypasta alright. That kind of thing always seems like it best suits an anthology series, shorter episodes that just have fun with the spoopy atmosphere and can hint at more without having to strain the concept.
Hm, I just want the very obvious idea of an SCP X-Files. I’ll happily watch a 40 minute episode about a steam-powered photocopier that only produces images of butts when you try to do normal copies - but NEVER try to photocopy your own butt. 20 minutes of wading through buttprints to secure the target, 20 minutes of designing a massive concrete block and dropping it inside.
(and yeah there was Warehouse 13, but it was such an obvious and cheap ripoff of Warehouse 23 - itself a good ripoff of Indiana Jones - that I can’t like it)
Yep, pretty much sums it up. Backrooms has all that plus
3070 mins of the protags photocopying their butts with a veneer of ‘hmm why is protagonist photocopying theyre butt, it must be because of psychology’Edit: i just checked the runtime, it’s 1h50m
Sounds like your standard creepypasta alright. That kind of thing always seems like it best suits an anthology series, shorter episodes that just have fun with the spoopy atmosphere and can hint at more without having to strain the concept.
The movie was made by Kane Parsons, who prior to this point had a series of short films on the Backrooms that I guess still had too much lore rather than evocative hints, but is somewhat closer to what you’re describing because they had less overall continuity, with each video being more like an individual event involving different people (usually, mostly) in a broader escalating situation.
I just want the very obvious idea of an SCP X-Files
I’ve wondered about this one for a long time, why haven’t they done something like this? In fact, I think it’s much more likely now that Backrooms has been hugely successful, that someone in charge will finally think “yeah this piece of internet creepypasta lore would actually work well on screen.”
My understanding (uninformed) is that licensing and consensus are extremely difficult given the distributed community of contributors, patchwork history, and lack of requirement for a consistent internal narrative.
With backrooms, there were a few random posts on different internet boards, not a centralized, established repository (so no licensing tied to any of the posts). Then a dude makes YouTube videos that are obviously his own intellectual property, and a company goes “hey wanna make a real Hollywood movie?”
With SCP, there’s two decades of different authors putting their own spin on things. Most of the video games with obvious SCP ties (Control, Abiotic factor, Lethal Company) presumably started with “SCP is pretty cool, let’s make a game”…“oh we’d have to get permission from all these authors, and we’d have to pick and choose which storylines we like and deconflict them, and we wouldn’t be able to own and develop and shape our series without consulting them, and we wouldn’t even own any IP”…“hey let’s make an SCP-like game and maybe message one or two authors we like for ideas and lore”.
There is SCP: Containment Breach but that was much earlier in the site’s history and it’s free with creative commons licensing.
My understanding (uninformed) is that licensing and consensus are extremely difficult given the distributed community of contributors, patchwork history, and lack of requirement for a consistent internal narrative.
Hexbear: The Movie destined to be forever stuck in development hell
It was ok, the first part was good the last part just confused me and i couldn’t really understand what the hell was happening.
I thought it was well done. More tense than horrific. There’s no jump-scares. There are thematic layers without being too heavy handed about it. The 3rd act seems to divide people, but I thought it worked.
omg i literally had the same thought when the hot guy died I was like “Aw, what a shame.”
