In 2017, A24 started distributing trailers for a movie that appeared to be about a family being menaced by a spooky little girl. Of course, when people actually saw Hereditary the next year, they were horrified at what happened to that little girl, but they were also thrilled with A24’s ability to sell a film without ever really telling anyone what it was about.
That audience response has made room for trailers such as the one for Backrooms, the upcoming release from Kane Parsons, better known to some as the YouTuber Kane Pixels. The trailer consists of nothing but a camera panning downward through a building filled with yellow/beige rooms, several of which have a decrepit easy chair within them. In voice over, we hear a man describe to a woman a place that he discovered, filled with rooms that “remember.” At the end of the teaser, the camera stops at an empty space that resembles an office building, with the man saying, “The more times it remembers something, the less it does.”
What does that mean? I have no idea, and that’s the scary part. Like most horrifying things, Backrooms traces its roots back to 4chan, where users shared posts of “liminal spaces,” rooms and areas that seemed to exist at the borders of reality. In 2022, Parsons began releasing short films about a research institute called Async, which investigates a place called the Complex, which seems to be involved with missing persons cases.
The films have been a hit among younger users. But for older viewers, the trailer for Backrooms brings to mind to Swedish home store Ikea, with its streamlined designs. And the concept of scary rooms stacked upon one another recalls Cube, the Canadian indie horror film that did torture porn before the term “torture porn” annoyed everyone as the term “elevated horror” annoys everyone.
