Have you been uncomfortable? How Backrooms uploaded a horror video | Horror movies

Chiwetel Ejiofor has been in many movies, but The Back Rooms was different: a 30,000 sq ft labyrinth of corridors and elegant rooms, all carpeted, fluorescent-lit and decorated in the same sickly yellow wallpaper. It was so big that people got lost in it, said Ejiofor: “Especially in the early days.” When you’re trying to go around in a roundabout way and you’re like: ‘I’m sure it’s this door, I’m sure it’s that way.'” He laughs at the memory. “And you find yourself back in the wrong corner of the whole studio and you’re like: ‘Get me some help!’

This is the type of concept behind Backrooms – the video and online experience that started it. It’s an idea that needs to be released, but as with A24 horror, you can summarize it as “Blair Witch Project meets Severance” or “Light living in an infinite Travelodge” or maybe “the exact opposite of a Wes Anderson movie”. The comparison doesn’t go down well, perhaps because Backrooms’ concept feels like it’s from another world – a similar part, even. Ejiofor admits: “There were things we were doing towards the end of the movie where I was like: ‘This is one of the most amazing things I’ve ever done.’

Perhaps even more surprising than Backrooms’ concept is that its creator is only 20 years old. The Californian director, Kane Parsons, had never made a film before this. Like most Zers, he hadn’t been to the movies much: “It’s something I’ve never made enough time for before,” says Parsons, apologetically, in a Los Angeles chat. “The growth is YouTubeit’s like there are few things that are needed to go to a movie theater and to eat.”

Whether Parsons is the death of cinema or his fate is unknown. In person he is not shy and difficult or loving and overconfident; very deep and direct, and very talkative – “sorry, I’m a bit playful,” he once said. He hasn’t started yet: Parsons has been making movies since he was a kid, he says, and has made several hundred of them. He spends more time creating things than destroying them, he says. However, I’m going to this big group, and managing athletes and actors twice his age, like Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve and Mark Duplass, it’s a scene that many newcomers would find intimidating, if not terrifying.

“I realized it was a big, potentially shocking, leap forward,” Parsons says confidently. “Like: ‘Holy shit, I’m on the fast track somehow, because some bad boss decided…’ I don’t know how it all went where it is now. But I was there, and I knew I wanted to make the film, and I knew how to make what I was making online.

The stories behind the back rooms and Parsons himself intertwine. It started with a single photo, taken in 2003 but posted in May 2019 on the 4chan message board inviting users to submit “creepy images that just feel ‘far away'”. This photo, of a shopping mall in Oshkosh, Wisconsin – the fluorescent lighting, the suspended ceiling, those dark yellow sheets – somehow struck a nerve and took on a life of its own in the fertile field of “creepypasta” – which it’s viral on the Internet. People started writing stories based on it, expanding this imaginary universe into an unstable but strange universe.”a place to live“. The r/Backrooms subreddit now has over 350,000 members. One behind the wiki lists the fictional characters, 100 different episodes and a list of the “groups” they live in.

Parsons said: “I first saw that picture when I was in the eighth grade. “I probably saved it on my computer at the time and I was often like: ‘That makes me happy.'” At the time he was living in Petaluma, north of San Francisco, still sharing a room with his brother. His parents divorced, amicably, when he was seven. He lived with them, and he felt a connection to them, both of them, he says. His father is a photographer and his mother is an assistant. “These two perspectives have probably created many things, in many ways that I couldn’t explain.”

His father wasn’t direct, but he was drawn to 3D animation “through casual osmosis”, he says. He grew up drawing, playing sandbox games like Minecraft and watching “how to” YouTube videos. Then, in 2020, Covid happened. He said: “I didn’t face any other problem during the epidemic. For me, they often called me: ‘Ha!

Parsons’ original rooms were an exercise in horror in their own right, adding to that horror image in a very, very scary way – all 90s movies, humming lights and corners you wouldn’t dare look around (and we’re not alone down there). He posted it on YouTube in 2022, where it quickly collected “the most terrifying video on the Internet”. Within two weeks, it had 20m views; he has about 80m today. Although this was not unusual for Parsons: for the past few years, he has posted shorts related to the beloved manga. Attack on Titanwhich could always watch 10m. The background material he saw as a “palette cleaner” at first, testing his creativity. But the answer encouraged him to continue.

By the time Hollywood did it all in 2023, Parsons – still in high school – had created 22 more episodes of his back rooms, adding depth and background (in one eight-minute episode, a group of government investigators. scan the ceiling of the back rooms and detailed forensic analysis). People still have a hard time believing these YouTube shorts are 100% digitally animated, made by a teenager with a laptop, but Parsons proves they really are.

Translating this story into a feature-length film, with actors, was difficult – mainly because the power of the idea comes from the impersonality, the lack of life. Reinsve, best known for domestic dramas such as Joachim Trier’s recent Sentimental Value, “was nervous”, he says, working with “someone who doesn’t have what he shows in the movies”. “But he was also interested in “this new wave of building a creative thing”. When he met Kane he was attracted. “I just found him to be intelligent and eloquent”, and during the shooting, he made fun of his lack of films. Blue Velvet. And he was like: ‘Oh, I’ve never seen that.’ I said: ‘Really? You’re a filmmaker and you haven’t seen this movie?’”

But youth and experience can be helpful, says Ejiofor: “You can have such strong thoughts and clarity of thoughts when you are young.” There is something very interesting about a person who is incredibly knowledgeable about something and has the ability to express it in a way that is unhindered, unencumbered by this development process.”

Ejiofor plays a failed craftsman in the film, who now runs a cheap furniture warehouse and sleeps in it. Reinsve plays his assistant, who is worried when he comes to her saying that he has found a similar and strange, yellow place. They also have properties related to design, too. They all lead to endings that aren’t fun and are impossible to fully explain, even if you’ve done your YouTube homework. There’s more to the story, Parsons admits: “There’s a lot of room to explore there.”

In fact, these previous rooms seem to be created from (or maybe) the imagination of their guests, being the most beautiful and beautiful that the guests continue to go to – an infinite descent of copies, unmoved from reality, that is, to be successful. “A lot of times it remembers something, it fades away,” says Clark, Ejiofor’s man.

“I think Kane is looking at what’s in the minds of a lot of people,” says Ejiofor. “I leave some days thinking: what the hell to do Am I thinking about my memory? How can I change the situation? Do I make my own back rooms, messy for other things? Do I work around a little bit and change a little bit?”

The content also interested Reinsve, “as it revolves around psychology and how you can be led astray by your behavior and how difficult it is to break free”.

“On a personal level, you can say that this place opens up to someone who might have closed himself off somewhere else and has been quiet, staring at the wall for a long time,” says Parsons, but he also sees the back rooms as an expression of a larger problem, “an empty space spread by one industry”.

He explains that “the obvious consequences of everything that we as a species have been doing for a long time, … everywhere is beginning to look the same, and we are drowning in consciousness. form.”

What they seem to be finding is that the built environment is already a reflection of the madness of our culture. The banality and bad, you might say. Others interpret the metaphor in terms of everything from Covid-19 isolation to artificial intelligence to the ever-present “meaningful death”.

Ejiofor sums it up eloquently: “I hear what it’s saying. I can’t explain it well, but I hear it – and it’s a movie, right?”

But not as we know it. The online film/game/DIY scene that Parsons came from can become a vital part of the film industry, injecting new talent and stories into the industry. It doesn’t always work: The 2018 Slender Man movie tried to pull off a similar creepypasta trope — and failed. But the YouTube pipeline has also brought the likes of Bo Burnham (The eighth group), Danny and Michael Philippou (Talk to Me, Bring Himand David F Sandberg (Turn on, Annabelle: Nature).

Parsons disagrees with the format: “Who gives a damn if it’s a movie, if it’s a TV show, if it’s a video game? It’s like: ‘This story. How strongly does it make you feel and adopt these ideas that they’re trying to express?’ “I think that was an unconscious, common, internet-based thing that I grew up with: I was more interested in the content of the story than the narrative.”

Even if Parsons could save cinema, he probably wouldn’t want to. He’s been happy doing things on YouTube himself, after all. “It felt like I had no time and no budget and no restrictions other than what I could do with one laptop and how much time I wanted to do something.”

But when it comes to film careers, you couldn’t wish for a better start. Making a “proper” film has earned him renewed appreciation from the medium, he says. “I’m still not a big cinephile, but I’m not under a rock and I have a lot of interests”, he says. He was very happy to do the sound mixing for Backrooms “and to realize how the mixing of the theater is related to the close mixing (for broadcasting or printing). Suddenly I was like: ‘Wait a minute, I have to go to the cinema for everything I watch from now on.’ So yes, I am very happy with my experience in this film. ” And he is only 20 years old; more time to watch Blue Velvet.