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| the original backroom image |
What was clear about the cinematic Backrooms was that we, as an audience, may not have gotten satisfying answers as to what was going on, nor do any of the characters truly understand what's happening, but it's absolutely clear that Parsons himself knows precisely what is happening. And he's not telling, he's showing, but in pieces.
What I wasn't clear on while sitting in the movie theatre, thoroughly absorbed in Parson's uncomfortable alt-reality, was whether Backrooms was its own thing, a soft reboot of the work he did online, or if it was just a part of it. It the days since, consuming Parsons' Backrooms youtube videos, a few other videos from avid fans who obsess over the details of Parsons' Backrooms, and interview videos and podcasts with Parsons himself, it's clear it's definitely just one part of the whole. You don't need to have seen the web series, but if you want to know more, it will definitely tell you more.
Parsons' youtube series, which he started working on at 16, opens with a group of kids in 1990 making a horror movie with a camcorder, when the kid with the camera falls through a soft spot in reality and finds himself in the backrooms. It is then 9 minutes this "character" exploring digitally created spaces (using Blender, open source 3-D modelling software) through the camcorder lens, digital tracking fuzz laid over top of it all to really give that grainy and retro vibe. It's effectiveness is at least 50% sound design, just the ominous buzz of fleurescent lighting, a pervasive humm (very Lynchian), the characters' shuffling footsteps, the haunting howls of *something* in the distance. It's intense and captivating, and then the thing from the distance is right in front of you. It's completely channelling first-person shooter vibes, sans the action. If you turn the corner and something unreal is in front of you, there's no shooting, the only choice is to run away. It's something that will happen again and again in this series.
That might sound repetitive, but it's not the only trick up Parsons' sleeve.
While that first video was just a thing Parsons made adapting the ideations on backrooms on message boards into a video, the second video Parsons release is a sub-3-minute montage of images of all sorts of retro imagery of odd spaces and pre-90's technology and people using such technology (with their eyes or faces blacked out) and out of context bits of text...all once again seeming like it's being played on a grainy video, its haunting soundtrack warbling in and out. The next video, once again playing like a worn-out video cassette tape features more imagery of blueprints as a creepy-as-hell digitized voice starts to explain about magnetic distortion experiments that revealed the backrooms and the plan was to use such spaces as ...storage. We then see the video from 1988 of the third test showing the opening of a portal.
Currently, there are 22 videos in the series and many of them are just short moody atmospheric pieces, showing imagery that is meant to expand and connect the lore of Parsons' Backrooms together, others are more FPS exploration videos, and still others are communications from Async, the in-world corporation that is trying to figure out how to monetize the backrooms while also studying them.
There is a multi-video narrative arc around the hazmat-suited teams that explore the spaces, and how one of them, Peter Tench, disappeared one day while exploring the backrooms. Given what the Async team already knew about the dangers of the backrooms, they presumed Tench dead, when in reality he had been pushed forward two months ahead in time. Tench found his way into an Async control room and triggered an alarm. But his reappearance led to other, more dramatic problems. And more questions.
The distortion of reality in the backrooms, it's reinforced in both the web series and the movies, has pretty disastrous effects on the mental state of people who find themselves alone in the space for any extended period of time. As we see multiple times through the web series, there are multiple (increasing) soft spots in reality that people (and birds) fall through, some of them with video cameras.
As a physical exploratory space, there isn't much logic to the backrooms, why they twist and wind and connect the way they do, but as you dive into the series you can begin to intuitively grasp what it is even if it's not easy to describe with any surety. The repetition of certain areas, or certain types of areas, intones that there's a reason for them. A sequence in the film finds the camera panning down from a room in reality to that same room layers and layers deep into the backrooms, the distortion of the reality of each room more and more evident the further down you go, almost like echoes, growing fainter the more it reverberates. This is what makes the backrooms so compelling...that you can almost grasp what's going on, but just not quite.
There are multiple types of creatures in the backrooms, including weird mould/fungal monsters, distorted remnants of half-remembered people, and haunting creatures that are dark Ids made real. Some of them wail, some of them mimic human speech, some of them do both. While the backrooms are seemingly endless, it doesn't seem like you can exist within the space long without encountering one of these beings, and they're not docile, even if some of them are ...edible? The very first creature in Parsons' first video is pretty doofy, but each monster after that has been effectively creepy.
Parsons works not just in Blender, but multimedia. There are videos that feature real people in real environments, and real people in digital environments. Real images are manipulated into surreal images, and Parsons' use of electronic music, typically slow, eerie, haunting chords, contributes deeply to the atmosphere (at times the music will drown out the words spoken in the video, implying that mood is more important than what's being said, or, perhaps, toying with the audience by further burying information behind the sounds). Parsons uses voice actors throughout his productions to varying degrees of effectiveness, but he always nails the tone, so even mediocre vocal performances get a pass.
Especially with the first-person-shooter (in this case the "shooter" is the video camera) videos that track through the backrooms, it's often too evident that it's a digital reality. This is no shade on Parsons who is very effectively working with the tools afforded to a teenager, but wow, is it ever a level-up to see these environments cast into reality on the big screen. And the realization of the backrooms from digital into actual sets is phenomenal.
The film adds the next layer to the Backrooms mythos. While the youtube videos explores the mythology behind it all, the film explores characters and how they are affected by - and affecting - the backrooms. This idea, barely hinted at in the youtube videos, is the sole thrust of the movie. But, again, answers are actually shadows of answers. Satisfaction not guaranteed.
In interviews Parsons has said he would like Backrooms to continue as an anthology TV series, and that seems like the obvious direction for this to go. But given its thunderous success at the box office, it's more likely a second feature will happen before a TV series (let's get real, a streaming series) does.
I am all-in on this ride. While I worry that maybe Parsons doesn't yet have the life experience or awareness to handle much outside this sphere of creepy, moody, atmospheric pieces, it's clear he's very assured and purposeful in his direction and that he has many talents when it comes to putting vibes and aesthetics together. He's cultivated a pretty substantial audience for a reason, so talent is not lacking. With this property, at least, he seems to know exactly where it's going, if maybe not entirely what it's saying.
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