‘I’ve got a place’: how Backrooms takes on the dangers of bad architecture | Horror movies

WChicken producer turned furniture store owner Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) discovers a mysterious “back room” in the basement of his showroom, struggling to explain to his doctor, Dr Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve).

“I found a place…”

This innocuous word becomes a frightening summary of Construction hazards he got into Back roomsthe new A24 entertainment that takes us into cramped office spaces, dead malls and other dangerous places that don’t exist here or there. Kane Parsons, a 20-year-old director – the youngest ever to work with the studio – created the series YouTube shorts called Backrooms using the free 3D Blender software and Adobe After Effects. The series has now been adapted into a feature-length film, although it retains its visual and emotional language.

“Liminal Spaces” it is a place that seems to be in the middle of another place, or left out of the world. It is what the philosopher Mark Auge called non-space, “a space that cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or related to knowledge”. Architect Rem Koolhaas called them “An empty space“It’s a remnant created by modern technology, where everything looked the same, and there was an end to “space,” in favor of neutral, meaningless places like airports and supermarkets. A24 podcast. “We’re kind of stuck in this monoculture.”

As a high-end site, “backrooms”, including Parsons’s YouTube series, are fictional expansions of the shopping center that died in the early 2000s. In fact, the first image to bring the site to the Internet, which was posted in 2003, was from a renovation Retail and Payment Centers in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. With the demise of the big box store, there is a liminal. The spaces of the middle of the 20th century – airport terminals, supermarkets and, most importantly, supermarkets – are gone, they are very distant from the places where they used to be, impersonal. Shopping malls are junkspace; the dead market is a liminal place.

The back rooms make up the whole world of this wonderful establishment. “There’s probably no better sign of that kind of thing than a low ceiling,” Parsons said. The fluorescent rooms repeat, taking Clark and Dr Kline deeper as they try to figure out where the world came from and who controls it. Parsons is very interested in what he calls “the universal laws that made our consciousness what it is”, and he wants to convey a feeling of unlimited authority on screen. As if liminal spaces indicate absence, Backrooms create fear by turning to what is left; nothing is known as to which institutions control the eternal land, what is happening beyond doors and corridorsand what rules they set.

These kinds of dangers remind us gialo films including Suspiria and Inferno by Italian filmmaker Dario Argento where the house becomes a monster. The surrounding area is haunted by some spirit or evil, without revealing what it is. In all these films, like Backrooms, the action takes place in unscripted rooms that form a labyrinth. A mind map that the viewer tends to create on the screen construction it becomes inconsistent. Clark tries to map the back rooms, but to no avail. The confusion adds to the suspense.

The combination of the dangerous and the strange is the starting point for the danger in Backrooms. In the same TV format as To quit, Strange Things or BlackThe portal pulls us into a world where the rules are not clear. There is someone or some other power that is controlling a foreign country. Is it a government job? Interdimensional entities? Companies with proprietary technology? I am laboratory travel time, MKUltra or a UFO program? Or is it something too boring? Asych’s mysterious company offers little explanation for Clark.

Architect Damjan Jovanovic calls the banning of everyday life “unusual fundamentals“, or “a beautiful name for what it feels like to live in a world that has been brought about by documents instead of stories.” Artists Mat Dryhurst and Holly Herndon have coined the term “protocol art,” a practice that deals with the rules that show how culture is created, shared and recognized in the digital age as a computer process. platforms and various technical tools.

The low ceilings, the high ceilings, the yellow lighting all create a feeling of absence, centrality, passion and indifference of the government. Like Fritz Lang’s 1927 classic The citytries to understand the built environment accelerated by people and its effect on the human mind. “Architectural spaces are… mainly places of imagination,” says architect Juhani Pallasmaa in reference to Alfred Hitchcock. Back Window. “Architecture also directs our thoughts to other things.” The back rooms create “buildings” on the screen that capture these feelings, and bring us into the world.

In Backrooms, the journey is palpable, as we take a deep dive with Clark into the secret architecture beneath his shop. The film captures the infinite spaces that Parsons interacts with on the Internet, continuing a long love affair between horror and architecture.