Back Rooms is a horror movie about some of the creepiest places imaginable the nondescript beige-carpeted rooms that populate countless office spaces and discount furniture warehouses.
If you've ever worked in a rundown office park or shopped for a cheap mattress, the vibe will be instantly familiar dingy claustrophobic, maybe with cheerful music piped through tinny speakers, and always with the unsettling flickering hum of fluorescent lights.
That setting forms the central concept of Back Rooms, which doesn't have a plot so much as a deeply unnerving sense of place.
It's a surreal and unsettling bit of horror based on a popular YouTube series.
I'm Stephen Thompson.
Today we are talking about Back Rooms on Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR.
Joining me today is Jordan Cruciola.
She's a writer and producer and the host of the podcast Feeling Scene on Maximum Fun.
Hey, Jordan.
Hello.
Thank you so much for having me back.
It is a pleasure.
Also with us is freelance music and culture journalist Rihanna Cruz.
Hey, Rihanna.
Hey.
Hey, Stephen.
Happy to be here.
Great to have you.
So in Backrooms Chiwetel Ejiofor plays the manager of a pirate-themed discount furniture store called Cap'n Clark's Ottoman Empire.
As he discusses with his therapist, played by Renata Reinsva, his life is falling apart.
He's getting a divorce, he drinks too much and he's carrying around the massive weight of ambient stress.
And to make matters worse, while living in the store, he discovers a secret labyrinth of back rooms.
Each has a strange and unsettling design.
Tiny doors with three knobs, narrow passageways, piles of strangely familiar laundry, masses of junky furniture stacked ominously.
The disorienting effect of Back Rooms is magnified through the film's use of found footage, as we view some of the rooms via fuzzy images shot on vintage camcorders.
Back Rooms' origin is what's known as a creepypasta.
For those who don't know, that's a catch-all phrase used to describe pieces of horror folklore that spread on the internet.
Kane Parsons made a popular Backrooms web series for YouTube when he was a teenager.
This is his debut feature.
He's only 20.
Backrooms is in theaters now.
Rihanna Cruz, I'm going to start with you.
What did you think of Backrooms?
I think I like it more the more I think about it, to be honest.
There's a bunch of things going for it.
You know, it's technically stunning.
The production design I find incredible.
The choices that Cain Parsons is making as a director feel very beyond his years.
You know, they feel super seasoned.
And I think the best parts of the movie are when it commits to this analog aesthetic and the vintage horror style that you find in the YouTube series.
I don't necessarily think it functions the best it could outside of YouTube, to be honest, but I think that's intentional, right like I don't really find Backrooms the movie scary, and I don't think it really functions well as a horror movie, but as like a conceptual project with weird disarming elements and lots to say about the nature of memory and the reproduction of thought.
I found that fascinating.
And I like generally how it feels in direct opposition to the class of tell-don't-show horror movies that we're in right now, especially like YouTuber horror movies, thinking of Obsession, thinking of Shelby Oaks, things like that.
It's refreshing to watch something That feels new and exciting and doesn't feel like I'm being spoon fed horror, you know.
Sure.
And I love that.
This movie is very light on lore and very heavy on just showing you things that will creep you out.
Yeah, and I really, really dig that.
And I think, like I love a horror movie that makes you sit and think about why you're uncomfortable.
The things that were the least successful for me in Back Rooms were, you know, the overtly horror elements.
I think the unsettling vibe was really compelling to me and...
I enjoyed that overall.
Okay.
How about you, Jordan?
I really liked this.
I like anything.
I'll watch anything.
I'm a straightforward person, kind of first and foremost.
I don't necessarily need to be like, no one told me anything and I had an amazing time.
I liked that I was just existing in this place.
It worked for me a lot better than I think a movie like this typically would, as my wife and I discussed on the way out.
It, like The Cell...
Different, but really captured that feeling of being in a nightmare, the illogical nature of it, the endless nature of it, the imprisoning nature of that in a world that only can be conjured by your dreams because real tangible life happens. could not accommodate such strangeness it really really does that an excellent use of period piece this being set in the 90s and the it made a surreality of true things about the 90s that made the sense of place feel like a character too like that furniture store can still exist somewhere, but it really existed then, which means you could have ended up in any manner of iterations of it.
And kind of the sterility of place and everything around you and the quietness of it.
It's such a great contrast for the raw emotional performance that Chiwetel Ejiofor is always going to bring you.
He is such a raw emotional performer.
And I thought him set against the All of his surroundings and environments was a really great contrast and also a great comparison to the Scandinavian stoicism of Renata Reinsva.
Well-chosen, select cast.
As they went further and further into this place, we've heard about how like They really practically designed this gargantuan location that people were actually kind of getting lost in on set.
Oh, gosh, I can only imagine.
I'm so happy they dove into the whole world.
They built it.
They let this kid see it through as a feature.
And it just feels unlikely in so many ways.
And I'm super excited that it exists.
Would highly recommend.
Yeah, I mean, I agree with most of what both of you are saying.
I definitely want to shout out Superior Production Design.
This is a really, really well-built company.
Yeah.
That gives you just this sense of kind of Kafkaesque horror.
But also it's tapping into several different deeply unsettling things about society, which is what the best horror is.
Stuff does, right?
Like you're taking something mundane and making it terrifying.
And what is more mundane than these beige fluorescent lit that like piped in cheer?
The voice that is, like, welcoming you in a bunch of different languages.
It's supposed to be pulling you in, but it's absolutely pushing you away.
Like, those effects, I think, were so smartly leveraged here.
And I'm surprised we have gone this far into this film when we're talking about what this film is commenting on, without mentioning AI.
Yeah.
Because this film, I mean, it's set in the early 90s.
Not only is it pre-AI, it is pre-internet.
It's pre-cell phones.
Interesting, yeah.
Rihanna, you referred to the kind of dream logic that is going on in a lot of these rooms.
But there is also this uncanny valley of AI imagery and how creepy and unsettling it can be when you see a figure that is supposed to look like a human but it has too many fingers.
The denizens of the back rooms are definitely like early ginned up AI creations.
Is that nine fingers?
Absolutely.
And it's done in a surprisingly subtle way.
It's not underlining that for you in any way, shape or form.
But you are sitting there like why am I having the same creeped out unnerved feeling that I get when I look at bad AI?
Totally.
And I think it's really using that in such strong ways.
No matter how much it's intending to be commenting on it, it is to me unmistakable.
I will say I yearned for a smaller screen.
First of all, it is very interior.
Uh-huh.
And I think the smaller a screen you watch it on it, the more interior it will feel and the more unsettling it will feel.
Yeah, I agree with you, Steven.
I am also a person who gets motion sickness from shaky cam.
I almost had to walk out of Blair Witch Project all the many years ago when I saw it in theaters, like everybody else.
Not because it was too scary, but because I wanted to vomit.
Yeah, that was the hidden headline when people were like people are walking out of Blair Witch Project and throwing up
It's like, it's because they're sick.
It wasn't because they were so scared.
They were scared, but it was because they were motion sick.
Right, and this film does, if you are somebody who is very sensitive to that...
It's worth being warned that it has a bunch of shaky cam stuff.
It opens with enough shaky cam stuff where I was fully sitting there thinking can I gut this entire movie out.
Yeah.
Or am I going to have to go get a popcorn bucket?
Am I going to have to go get a giant deer Spielberg Disclosure Day popcorn bucket right now?
To hold my back room's vomit.
So, you know, that's a me thing.
That's not most people.
But I did find like, as I was thinking about it, I'm like man, I think this would be really even maybe even more powerful.
Yeah, I agree with you, Steven.
I'm not sure if this works not on YouTube, to be honest, because that's the creepypasta element of it all.
You know, like part of what makes the backroom scary is that you feel like you're like stumbling upon something that is real.
It's out there.
You know you're not supposed to see this, and when you frame a narrative around it as somebody that watched the original backrooms clips on youtube like when you frame a narrative around the vibe of analog horror, i've I think a lot of the power of the images are lost.
You lose that kind of uncanny valley feeling because it's blown up and there's clearly a budget.
And I don't know it loses a little bit in that regard, and my least favorite parts of the movie were when it feels like a traditional movie, you know where you have a plot, you have a narrative, you have these characters.
The best parts of the film are when it shies away from this and you get the and I wish there was more analog horror stuff.
But I also say this as somebody that liked the movie Skinnamarink a lot, which exists.
You're a liminal space horror person, a liminal person.
I really like that movie.
And I do think there's similarities between, like the quiet analog liminality of that film and back rooms.
And I just wish it leaned into that a little bit more.
Everything with Renata, the therapist character.
I was kind of tapped out for it.
I did not like her casting.
I thought it was out of place.
Yeah.
And I think maybe it was just, I was wanting more of that sit back, let it wash over you feeling.
And I think her character serves a lot to explain how we should be feeling.
And I didn't, enjoy that as much as I could have.
I think occasionally taking the film out of those back rooms and into the real world helped situate how unsettling those worlds were.
I certainly appreciated having a little bit of solid ground to stand on every once in a while.
I also just, I'm a Renata Reinsva stander.
The queen of Cannes, Renata Reinsva.
I just love Renata Reinsva in everything I see her in.
And so anytime she turns up in anything, I'm like, oh boy.
So I don't necessarily, I'm not sure I'm capable of thinking she's miscast.
Well, I wonder if because, like what you're saying, if like the message kind of is the medium with this for you.
Like yeah, I wonder, for the big screen, does the concept like as you experience it on YouTube like, do we like literally need these inserted moments of grounded reality for that big screen, for that 4K experience that is going to be in the theater?
Does the lo-fi analog over the course of like a theatrical runtime, do you start losing people?
Is it like, I'm in a theater, just kind of wandering.
Like do you need that glossy thing for people in theaters to be like yeah, I'm watching a movie as opposed to like this is the thing I could be watching on YouTube.
That like sets it apart.
Like, does it become a functional thing?
Do we think as opposed to even like like a horror necessity?
Yeah, I mean, I think it's mostly functional, but I do think there's even still a juxtaposition between the analog horror sections of the movie where it's very lo-fi, shaky cam, as you mentioned.
And the like really stark 4K better lit.
Sure.
And I just think whatever's happening outside the back rooms, I didn't really need.
I don't need like the therapy narrative to couch.
I don't need the trauma informed theme.
I don't know.
And maybe that's my personal taste.
It does spend a fair bit of time kind of hinting at more of a backstory for the Renata Reins of a character than it really pays off.
I kind of expected a little bit more ends to get tied together or a little bit more to be explained.
It kind of hints that she has a traumatic childhood that may be informing her perception of what's going on.
And I don't know that that fully coheres.
But I'm also not sure that full coherence is the point of a film like this.
Right.
I don't think it's supposed to like tell you how to feel.
And I enjoy that.
I was really I was reading Amy Nicholson's review of this for L.A.
Times and she got it.
She made a point that I thought was just so interesting, which is kid is so young.
Like and I say kid, it sounds pejorative.
I'm 40.
They're all children.
These kids today with that creepy pasta.
Yeah, that creepy pasta.
Like, I'm not the oldest person in the world, but God, 20 seems so young when you're twice that age.
But Amy pointed out that Cain Parsons is the same age as YouTube's first videos.
Like, his whole life.
Like, beginning to current, he is first.
Fully pickled.
He is brined in this maelstrom of digital material and processing and interface.
And to your point Stephen, with the mention of AI, that inevitably comes like part of the brine that we're all stewing in for someone like Kane Parsons.
He's never been in another soup.
This is what he's been in the whole time.
So like it was fascinating to watch it and think about, like man, the things your imagination is molded in.
And the caverns that it goes to has been exclusively defined by this thing, where I have like an adolescence under my feet before it started becoming something I really interfaced with.
You know, creative people are everywhere.
But, like for me personally, it was like I do think there is a way that this person's mind and his contemporaries, his cohort, will be wired together.
That actually my brain doesn't make this particular kind of creativity.
It's like having a brain that can be a creepypasta generator, as opposed to like figuring out how, what a creepypasta is along the way and getting into it.
To watch this and the way that some of those images are really.
They are really resonant in comparing like how like AI images looked, especially when we were starting to get those really generated videos.
I was like, wow, this is like, we are watching a creative mind of purely digital conception.
I don't know what the guy's universal media diet is like, but like he clearly like platformed himself on YouTube, started making stuff there.
I was like dang, like that feels like a true, like we have hit a true generational divide between the creators that came before and the ones that came after, where it can now be pure digital native.
And as much as that term gets thrown around, and we're all used to all these platforms, et cetera, et cetera.
We are entering the realm of the ones who are utterly raised within the vacuum of that kind of medium.
And I was like, wow, that is wild to me.
And it made the movie, I think, feel even more intense when I was watching it.
Is this what they're like all the time?
Is this what they're thinking?
Like that kind of made it scarier for me personally.
I mean, I think that's a really, really, really excellent and important point.
And it's something that I've certainly thought about.
I've watched a lot of like teen coming of age movies that are supposed to be set in the present day but are clearly through a Gen X lens.
Yeah.
The number of coming-of-age stories that are like kids on bikes in a small town.
I am, yeah. the nature of kind of internet folklore that you can get steeped in.
All of these things were completely alien to my childhood.
And to see how that is going to affect our art going forward.
We we talk all the time about how negative it can be and how, how terrifying things like ai are to any kind of creative enterprise, but this film hints at a way that it could be deployed in extremely thoughtful and intriguing ways.
Well, like you were saying, it didn't quite feel right outside of its native environs of YouTube.
Yeah.
Like.
That's how true it is to the platform that I'm sure largely helped conceive like that this was even possible.
Like that's sort of how of its medium it feels.
As somebody who is younger and whose childhood was fully formed on the Internet.
Right.
Like my sense of what art is and what is scary was motivated by me stumbling on random YouTube videos when I was like 10 years older than being like holy.
Oh, my God.
Like, I shouldn't be looking at this, you know?
That's why I feel like the movie, to me, could have existed without maybe kowtowing to the studio demands.
The movie is strongest to me when it leans into its origins and what makes it good and what makes it freaky.
That's why I see it, with these added, you know, narrative structures, as less of a horror and more of like a drama with freaky elements.
I think it's a really smart movie.
You know like I walked out of there and I was like, did Cain Parsons read like Hito style theory?
Like I was like, He's really tapped into what it means to refract an image, refract a memory.
What does it mean when something is broken down to its bare bone parts and then built back together?
And I thought that was really, really intelligent.
And I just wish that maybe he trusted the audience just a sliver more to get there without adding what I felt was like an unnecessary kind of umbrella structure.
Like, yes to this.
Yes to a new talent that hasn't proven themselves conventionally necessary.
Because even Curry Barker has been making, like longer form, things that are more akin to conventional television or movie experience.
I don't know. where you have to like put your 10 years in.
So directors filmmakers, end up in this limbo where, like they need to make the thing and people keep telling them they need to have the thing made, but no one will give the resources to do it.
And yes, give 20 year olds the chance to like put this out.
And especially in horror where the horror people, they don't need to turn off for Chiwetel Ejiofor.
We're not a Ryan Swift. they will turn out because you said horror.
So at the very least, you're going to get some people through that door.
Hand the young filmmakers, these opportunities who've been working in mediums.
You probably don't understand enough to translate the totality of their vision onto the big screen and you need to make big screen compromises.
But let them do it and let's see what happens.
And I'm really glad we got to see what happens with Backrooms.
Absolutely.
Love it.
All right.
That brings us to the end of our show.
Rihanna Cruz, Jordan Cruciola, thanks so much for being here.
Thanks, Stephen, for having us.
The spring walk up to the quarter box office has been so strong.
This is all so exciting.
This episode was produced by Liz Metzger and Mike Katzeff and edited by our showrunner, Jessica Reedy.
Hello, Come In provides our theme music.
Thank you for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR.
I'm Stephen Thompson, and we will see you all next time.
