As a horror movie, it did legit get me freaked out and scared at times.
But overall the movie just made me feel… weird. My general feeling was just more of discomfort and anxiety.
But maybe that’s the point? The whole premise of the backrooms is it’s supposed to be this disassociating place. So maybe the film intended that.
I maybe need to rewatch to understand the films message on topics of therapy and memory, which I don’t think I fully grasped but seemed compelling at first glance.
Idk, odd film. Not sure how to feel about it.
From what I’m gathering in the comments it really seems like y’all really need to go read some Mark Fisher, specifically his stuff on Hauntology.
Our present has become a dead mall, our culture endless copies of copies of once genuine things.
Because this dead culture asks nothing of us aside from consumption, and we’re not required to give or change anything of ourselves; the horror is that maybe we like it here.
it’s the kind of thing that can only lose its value as it gets fleshed out
It could so easily have been so much worse. I appreciate they made it weird. I don’t think it’s particularly good, but it’s interesting.
that was the jist to me. i knew nothing of any pre-movie lore and went in blind. i understand there are meant to be more media to come.
i like existential/unknowable/cosmic horror themes and like how they handled the reveal, where it’s pretty clear the interrogator/organization that has been trying to systematically study the phenomenon probably knows only slightly more than the escapee.
my own theory is that it is a phenomenon that responds to being observed by replicating the memory of the observer within itself. human memory is a weird AF phenomena, so i think the idea is to riff that out into physical, interactive space.
most unknowable horror stories revolve around the idea that the only way to survive is to walk away and not trade away your sanity for knowledge, which is what i think is going on here.
it revived youtube poop
I am a big fan of the weird and abstract stuff and Backrooms really drew me in from that alone. I think the movie was about introspection, Clark being the one who refuses to look into oneself and move on. I think for Mary she worked as a therapist, not as a way to actually help people but rather to cope with her own trauma in her childhood and she eventually admitting that she can’t help anyone. She moves on by destroying a piece of her childhood memory that she kept around all these years(by smashing it against the monster). I take the movie’s theme as rather nihilistic which I guess fits with the Backrooms as that entire “world/dimension” makes no sense.
The whole misremembering a memory until it’s unrecognizable to be quite cool, it’s like the dreams I keep getting.
Overall the movie is definitely not for everyone, and maybe my analysis is wrong or even bad but I enjoyed it.
I’m pretty ambivalent about The Backrooms. I appreciate it as a decent horror movie visually, but it always bugs me when horror movies try to mix pop psychology messaging in there because most of the time if rings a little ableist to me.
I’ve seen people talk about the message of the movie being “You can’t help some people and Clarke totally wanted to be miserable.” And other victim blaming sort of stuff. I dunno, I find it a little nihilistic and lacking in empathy.
I’m waaay more excited for the SCP movie. It’s supposedly going to be an anthology and there is even talks about it being a part of the creative commons, which sounds interesting. No idea how that will work if that true. I’m worried that if it isn’t, that all this internet creativity is going to get stolen by corporations, so I really hope it somehow stays independent and publicly owned?
Evan Royalty has been making SCP short films with professional production quality for a while (basically, whenever he has the money). They’re mostly focused on MTF teams. When he isn’t making live action stuff, he does some pretty convincing machinimas that look great.
All of it is free on YouTube.
i liked it. I liked the juxtaposition of clark and mary, like theyre both people with some kind of trauma; they both kinda made their trauma other people’s problems, but where clark ended up being angry and hurting the people around him, mary tried to fix hers by fixing other people (
because if you can fix someone else then maybe someone can fix you) i kinda read the backrooms as like. a physical manifestation of how your trauma affects you and can affect the people around you.or yknow maybe like the director said, theres no deeper meaning and its all just a goofy ahh movie about non-euclidian office spaces ¯\(ツ)/¯
I liked it generally, but I thought the VHS-core setting/aesthetic was unnecessary and came across as quite lazy. I get that you want to hide the CGI behind a tape filter, and it’s handy that none of your characters have videogame glitches as a frame of reference, but you just end up with the age old found-footage problems e.g. the immersion breaking question of why this guy is filming his desperate escape attempt, especially with a clunky videocamera. In a modern setting the characters could have GoPros!
Also, maybe I’m just old, but I don’t find VHS artifacting spooky in the same way that zoomer audiences seem to.
But yeah, I liked it. It’s nice just to see an American horror movie that leaves things unexplained rather than inevitably cashing out to some evil demon antagonist with literal horns in an attempt to remain compatible with biblical lore.
That’s interesting. I have always found anlog horror scary because I grew up in the 90s. It reminds me of the rumors about creepy pastas that people thought were true and told them on the playground like they were true. The Blair Witch scared the shit out of me cause my cousin pointed at the movie in Walmart once and said “you know that’s real right?” Cause of the marketing. Idk it’s always just been creepy to me.
Also people filmed everything when they got cameras. My brother in law was going through old tapes and digitizing them and people just taped random shit like a random evening dinner. So personally I never really understood the criticism of found footage as someone who has been around and would probably be the person to film everything.
Oh I love found footage tbc, and I think Blair Witch is a brilliant film. I just don’t think it really brings much to Backrooms, particularly as it’s a concept that imo is very much playing to contemporary anxieties. It would have felt so much more vital in a 2020’s setting imo — you could have had ‘liminal space’ mall diving influencers ending up in the backrooms for example.
Non sequitur: have you seen Lake Mungo? If you find low-fi found footage horror, it is a masterpiece.
Oh I LOVE Lake Mungo! Have you seen I think it’s DeadSteam? It’s about a shitty streamer going into a haunted house. It’s more horror comedy but I don’t see it around as much.
As far as the backrooms. Did you know about his original YouTube series? I sent a link in a different comment. So it’s more a homage to that. Which was used to cover up his blender models originally. It’s shockingly well done. I think the time period is due to the original creepy pasta photo time period.
Of course your opinion is valid regardless but I think the context is important and I think it’s a little sad that they are not well known.
I don’t think I’ve seen Deadstream, but then maybe I have lol. There are quite a few films like that. In a similar vein, I thought Dashcam wasn’t as bad as everyone seemed to think. I don’t think Rob Savage will ever live up to the potential displayed in Host though.
I haven’t seen the original YouTube series of Backrooms, but I was aware it was a thing going into the movie. The thing about covering up the blender work rings true, because that’s exactly what I thought when I was watching the movie lol
Dashcam is on my list. I don’t think I’ve gotten to that yet. But yeah it would be very hard to follow up Host!
I think with Dashcam you will either fancy the lead or find her the most annoying person you have ever encountered. It’s got some good “how much worse could this get? THIS MUCH” moments though lol
Interesting, I’m def going to bump this one up.
I’m a millennial, and I thought the VHS filter made it seem as if it was the same shitty quality as the furniture store it was set in/under. It was obviously used to hide incredibly simplistic CGI, but it felt tonally-consistent.
While I was watching, I kept thinking about who did all of that drywall.
I loved it. I was a big fan of the youtube vudeos this was inspired by and I find the critique that the movie deviated from them a bit trite.
I highly recommend watching the YouTube series. He was the creator of those. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVAh-MgDVqvDUEq6qDXqORBioE4Yhol_z
Also he wasn’t as in charge of the script as he should of been so he had to really play around with it. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NB27PM6diX0&pp=ygURQW1hbmRhIGJhY2sgcm9vbXM%3D
It’s also useful if you are into SCP horror. This technically isn’t part of that, but it honestly could be with the similarities.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Do you have to be more than passively aware of the backrooms internet thing to understand it? I assumed it was for people who already know the lore or whatever
Not really. I was aware of the general concept but not much of the “lore”. The film keeps things ambiguous enough while giving plenty of hints as to what the nature of the Backrooms to people paying attention.
it was mid
i kinda felt the same way… like it was always on the precipice of being engrossing, but never quite made it. the ending was unsatisfying. i wasn’t sure what to think about it honestly.
Yeah having thought about it a bit, there was a few elements that came off more goofy than scary to me.
spoiler
The the whole thing with him eating the goop form the homunculus monster people almost made me roll my eyes instead of being horrified. Plus the pirate mutant was kinda goofy.
