I'm a long-term "OG" Kane Pixels fan. I took a friend to see the opening night preview and we both loved it.
Anyone not familiar with Kane - who was 16 when he started making his "found footage" films in Blender - the guy is a truly brilliant mind. Listening to him talk... you can close your eyes and he speaks like someone middle aged. It's almost uncanny.
Anyhow, in addition to his genuinely excellent Backrooms videos, I highly recommend you turn off the lights and take in his The Oldest View series as well.
I wasn't aware he was behind the oldest view. That makes me more excited to see this movie because that was really good on what couldn't have been much of a budget to begin with.
Matt Damon talked about this somewhere. The risk aversion stems from the move away from DVD sales. Historically a lot of low and mid budget movies relied on DVD sales to recoup costs even if theater releases didn’t get you as much money as you expected. With the safety net gone, studios don’t want to take the risk. They make big budget movies with massive marketing budgets that rely on known IP and established fan bases to guarantee income. This also ensures that the story itself is average because you want an average fan to like it.
I think calculus somewhere has changed that is allowing these small/mid sized movies to be made again.
> I think a scenario lots of viewers can relate to is sitting on the couch on a Friday night, going through the streaming services, cycling through the movies and thinking to themselves "they're not making movies for me anymore". As somebody who's been intimately involved in movie making for 30 years, what are the macro Hollywood conditions behind that sentiment?
> Matt Damon:
> Well, so what happened was the DVD was a huge part of our business - of our revenue stream - and technology has just made that obsolete. And so, the movies that that we used to make: you could afford to not make all of your money when it played in the theater because you knew you had the DVD coming behind the release and 6 months later you'd get a whole other chunk - it would be like reopening the movie almost.
> And when that went away, that changed the type of movies that we could make. I did this movie "Behind the Candelabra" and I talked to a studio executive who explained: it was a $25 million movie. I would have to put that much into print and advertising to market it - what we call P&A - so now I'm in $50 million. I have to split everything I get with the exhibitor, the people who own the movie theaters, so I would have to make $100 million before I got into profit. The idea of making $100 million on a story about this love affair between these two people... Yeah, love everyone in the movie, but that's suddenly a massive gamble in a way that it wasn't in the 1990s when they were making all those kind of movies - the kind of movies that I loved and the kind of movies that were my bread and butter.
This would be congruent with Damon's retelling of how a studio exec walked him through how the math of a traditional theatrical release wouldn't work out for the movie.
It’s because nobody has made Steam for Movies. Let me have a movie collection that I can buy movies $1-$5 per movie and never lose it and I promise you I will buy a lot more movies. Just like people buy hundreds of steam games
The iTunes movie store launched 20 years ago. It’s far from perfect but it is essentially steam for movies. Sadly it’s been de-emphasised over time. But it is still there and was pretty good for a while.
The iTunes movie store is not friendly outside of the Apple ecosystem. Making the entire idea not really affordable since you need a expensive electronic device to utilize it sanely. Might as well find another way to get to it at that point.
MSRP of an Apple TV device is $129. The iPhone's market share in the U.S. is already over 60%.
But neither matters because the Apple TV app is available on basically everything and can be used to buy movies.
That description befits GOG a lot more than Steam. You can absolutely lose you Steam games, both practically and legally. Practically because of DRM, and legally because you only recieve a non-transferable, revocable license.
You can buy at several places that interop with each other—iTunes and Amazon are the two biggest. They don’t have literally every movie, but they have most that most people want to watch. https://moviesanywhere.com/participants
Cost ranges from $5-30. Fewer dirt cheap sales than Steam, but the standard price point at launch is lower, in exchange.
(Having to explain “buying movies” makes me feel old!)
As someone already mentioned. Steam for movies already exists (iTunes, also Amazon’s offering). The problem seems to be that hardly anyone wants to actually own a movie anymore. There are places where the ownership model seems to still be thriving (books), but for video and audio, ownership (vs. streaming or renting) is largely dead.
No, streaming services like iTunes and Amazon are absolutely not "Steam for movies". Those services take active steps to restrict access to my purchased content.
I can't watch my Amazon purchases in HD because I run Linux. I get downgraded garbage 480p instead.
I can't watch any of this while on an airplane because I'm not allowed to download it.
And I don't own any Apple hardware so iTunes is a bit of a nonstarter.
In contrast, Steam lets me play offline and bends over backwards to get games to run (e.g. Proton and many other compatibility tools). And my Steam Deck doesn't earn me any extra special privileges over anything else.
People are saying that you can buy movies online, but I think they're missing the key point of putting lots of movies on massive discounts and promoting the movies that are currently discounted. Like sure you can buy basically any movie on Amazon or Apple's store or wherever, but I know that wherever I go, it's going to cost $4 to rent a movie, except every once in a while when it's on sale and I get it for $3, and buying it is going to be some higher amount that is almost certainly not worth it. When steam has sales, I might browse and buy quite a few games that I'm not gonna play right away. Or I buy things in bundles because it just seems like such a good deal. If movies were usually $10 to buy, but the Amazon store had a very visible section of movies that were $5 or less, but for a limited time, I'd be way more likely to buy multiple movies that I'm not intending to watch right now.
I just opened the Apple TV app on my phone and "$4.99 Essential Movies" is listed prominently just under the top charts and new releases. I'm not trying to be rude, but this whole thread has people just speculating on stuff with limited self-awareness. The reason you aren't building a big film library is probably because you aren't that passionate about films, it isn't because no one is providing you a list of cheap movies. It's all there already, you just had to open the app.
The problem for Hollywood is it's art, and when you create an assembly line that produces safe art, it's not going to be very good. The calculus is changing because so many of those "safe" films have been bombing recently.
AAA video game makers are having the same problem.
There was a lot more competition in the industry back then, before decades of consolidation. And less entertainment options competing for customers' attention.
I think this explanation is incomplete. There were still plenty of mid-size movies after the DVD era that still had profitable theatrical releases. The prototypical example to me is Baby Driver.
Pre-Covid there was simply not enough major weekends to release a big movie. They end up competing with each other.
Sure, Baby Driver made $300m on a $40m budget. But for pure profit maximization you are better off making a billion dollars on a $500m budget.
>Sure, Baby Driver made $300m on a $40m budget. But for pure profit maximization you are better off making a billion dollars on a $500m budget.
Lol no you're not. $1B off a 500M production budget would be a disaster bordering on a flop. You've not taking marketing into account. You've not taking having to split earnings with theaters into account. Baby Driver is the more desired outcome 10/10.
But if you make 10 $40m movies and 2 of them make $300m you've spent less for more revenue and a lot more profit, and that's assuming the other 8 make exactly $0
The calculus has changed because people don't give a flying fuck about celebrities on golden thrones these days, especially since your average YouTuber is more popular. The cost of celebrities in movie spins is fucking massive.
Hollywood has also completely failed to cultivate a new generation of celebrities. God, we had a few years of nothing but Pedro Pascal to the point we have memes inside memes.
And the cost of production has gone way down, you don't need a specialized studio to put in CGI these days when some guys Blender can do better.
So Hollywood is busy being in a downward spiral eating itself while so much room has opened for "indie" to eat their lunch and dinner.
This year seems to be turning a bit of a corner. Of the top box office movies so far this year there's Michael, Project Hail Mary, Hoppers, Wuthering Heights, GOAT.. with Obsession and Backrooms rapidly rising.
Last year it was basically F1 and Minecraft (and while not sequels, both are arguably well known "franchises" outside of movies - but I guess MJ and Wuthering Heights are too ;-)).
Wuthering Heights was a remake, and Hail Mary was also a safeish bet since it's a novel by the same guy as The Martian.
Not to say that it isn't an improvement, but we're still pretty far from seeing American cinema catching up to the world stage in originality, let alone to the golden Hollywood era.
I remember reading Project Hail Mary years before the movie was announced, and thinking "this is written, if not exactly as a screenplay, in such a way to make it SO easy to adapt to a screenplay that given this is from the Martian author there is no way this will not be made as a movie"
Yeah a lot of authors nowadays just write screenplay, either thinking on licensing or just by being influenced by tv. Sanderson and Abercrombie come to mind as other authors that basically have action scenes and movie cuts baked into the books.
At least Hail Mary was an original IP with no built-in sequel opportunity. These days, I'd be happy if more major studio, big budget releases were adapted from original IP books.
Sadly, I heard that the studio is apparently trying to figure out how to make a Hail Mary sequel (sigh).
Agreed, I've already been to the movies twice this year (PHM and Backrooms), usually it's maybe once every other year for some one-day anime movie airing. Really enjoyed both of them, just as with PHM, I think Backrooms is best viewed on a big screen.
Backrooms was a quite successful web series on YT which in turn originated in 4chan boards.
Only the medium being sourced from is changing from successful Broadway shows, popular novels or comic books in the years past. The calculus remains the same - properties with name recognition even from other formats tend to be green-light.
The web series and the film also defaulted to a very SCPified generic horror formula with conspiracy, "containment" and monster jumpscares.
But the original element that set backrooms/liminal spaces apart wasn't what was in them, but what wasn't. Sure it's creepy to be all alone, you may be afraid to get jumped, but you aren't. Some of the backrooms-inspired video games stay true to this concept.
So point is, the "Backrooms" film author may be an outsider, but he sticks to a very well-tried formula - one mainstream authors probably avoid for being too cliche more than anything.
it's the exact opposite of an original story. It's so successful because it is so strongly based on viral and meme-able internet content that is immediately recognizable to any person who spends time on the internet, it has its roots literally in creepypasta.
What A24 is doing with this movie is what the large studios have been doing, they're just doing it for a different audience. It's franchise driven content but simply 'gamer-coded' and sourced from Youtube or game-related media rather than from more traditional sources, mobilizing the gen-z fans of that content.
A similar thing is happening in video games. Big studios rarely have interesting games. Just GameTitle2026. Reboot of game from the 90s and no one is left of the original staff.
Still a lot of people buy those, so studios continue to make them.
Also indie games are too cheap. I noticed the need to correct my own thinking: Why should the boring game of a big publisher cost more than the great game made by a single guy? And allowed myself to use more money when I want to support smaller studios.
This is something people keep saying out of inertia. It hasn't really been true for a few years. There's been a ton of original movies lately. I guess they just don't get a lot of press or people don't go to the movies anymore. Here's a few from the last couple years:
Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die
Honey Bunch
Cold Storage
Send Help
Marty Supreme
Dust Bunny
Fackham Hall
Eternity
Rental Family
Bugonia
Roofman
Ok, going to cut this short because I'm only back to October 2025 and it's already long. Seriously, there's lots of movies out there that aren't part of a franchise or other IP (other than maybe books).
I think the key complaint about remakes isn't "the idea isn't totally original", the complaint is that studios are only willing to make IP that customers are already deeply familiar with. I don't think Green Planet really counts.
Between this, Iron Lung, and The Amazing Digital Circus finale getting a cinema release, I think this is shaping up to be a great year for small movie productions
The Amazing Digital Circus finale got completely shat on by fans after they leaked the ending and harassed Gooseworx because they didn't like it.
Is it worth being involved in indie production when success just guarantees a hate campaign against you? It will probably happen over Backrooms soon enough.
That’s an amazingly pessimistic take, and a shortsighted one. Glitch and the TADC team are more than just one person. Gooseworx is burned out, but her work helped kickstart many early careers among her staff. I think the only people who characterize TADC as a failure are folks who consume too much social media.
Like most projects, some indie productions (like TADC) end in creator burnout, others (like iron lung) end in moderate success, most probably end somewhere in between. We saw this with undertale, lights out, hazbin hotel, primer, el mariachi…
I don't think that cinephiles are a huge target market, though.
Major studios produce movies that most people want to see. The cinephiles don't like those films, but conveniently, they do like films that don't cost a quarter of a billion dollars to make.
The headline here is about a movie that took in $81 million. The Mandalorian took in about the same amount in its first weekend, and it's considered a financial disaster.
If people would start going to see more of those low-budget movies, they'd see a lot more interesting films. The cinephiles would be thrilled, because it would get those films into major theaters (over 2,000 for this film), rather than having to seek them out in tiny arthouse theaters for very few showings.
The big IP films got better distribution and marketing, but there hasn't really been a shortage of original films produced over the last decade. The big franchise movies are a small proportion of films produced.
But is this fresh content? Back rooms and liminal spaces have a history in games and websites. This wasnt an out there pitch. This was an identified interest area put on screen. A good movie, but not something totally new.
Does it qualify as something fresh? I guess fresh to cinemas but it is well established IP that has a readymade audience. Certainly a risk compared to Spider-Man: Another Adventure Again but the risk was in the execution. A lot like the Slenderman movie. Something like Iron Lung would be a better example of fresh cinema?
All they had to do was simply hire a talented person who knows how to make compelling narrative art. This is lost on the movie industry, though Hollywood has been treading water for over a decade now, failing to examine its failures and coasting on inertia.
In general, there is sooo much free money on the ground for large, hierarchical American corporations to do the following
1. Give young talented people resources and freedom
2. Don't put them through endless bullshit internal status games
The reason why the tech industry in the US thrives so much is partially due to the fact that it is one of the few industries that gives people high salaries and agency in their roles without a huge amount of experience.
Almost everywhere else is just an artifically gated series of internal politics, nepotism and pointless rituals in too-big-to-fail industries, which attract people who prefer these games over actual results.
I saw a Youtuber recently make a compelling argument that one of the features Hollywood has been missing is the pipeline of young, imaginative talent that music video direction used to provide. Backrooms, Iron Lung, etc. make a good case that YouTube can be that new pipeline.
My first thought is that it would be the very successful YouTubers that get approached by hollywood. And those people are already doing well for themselves independently and would most likely not want to move to the corporate culture without creative control.
The Backrooms kid got to spend three years working on a project he was clearly passionate about. He wasn't chasing clicks, creating daily content to keep the algorithm happy or worrying about ever mysterious ebb and flow of Google's payouts. He had an agent and manager that got him a deal and probably points on profit and who will make sure he gets paid. Sounds like a pretty sweet deal to me.
Hollywood is looking for a slightly different skill set than what YouTubers do, but what they do want is that relationship with an audience. Filmmaking chops can be taught and nurtured, but that trust that some of these creators have earned is gold to them.
I suppose if The Daniels were the last directors to enjoy the music video > Hollywood path then Neil Blomkamp might be the proto-example of Internet content > Hollywood.
I single out young people because they tend to be significantly undervalued with respect to their ability to contribute, especially in many industries which heavily gate on experience and connections.
People who dont live in San Francisco or New York are significantly undervalued with respect to their talent and ability to contribute in the tech industry. Same with women and black people.
I really enjoyed it. I had no idea what a “backrooms movie” would end up being, but it was exactly what I could have hoped for having enjoyed his other work.
Honestly creators from youtube putting out movies recently has probably been the most interested in going out to see something in years.
I saw it. I'm not a young Internet kid. And I enjoyed it - it's quite clever, I never cringed at terrible dialogue, people behaved in ways that you would expect them to in strange circumstances. Worth seeing. Amazing it was made by a 20 year old.
I think people are excited for new ideas in cinema. A24’s track record is far from perfect, but I respect their willingness to try things. In my opinion, this movie is no exception. Very meandering and largely devoid of any real plot. Did a good job holding the tension at points, but ultimately fell flat in delivering on that tension.
Probably worth a watch if you enjoy the genre. If you’re someone who just enjoys a good story, this is a pretty easy skip.
I practically never watch any movies because they are almost always trash, but decided to go watch Obsession after seeing a youtuber (penguinZ) talking positively about it
Yeah it's pretty good. I am in my late 30. Excited for Backrooms which isnt yet available
Chiwetel Ejiofor is a phenomenal actor, that probably helped. This is more of an indictment of Hollywood’s creative bankruptcy than anything, strip-mining Star Wars or Marvel will only take you so far.
The movie was great but it's not a stand-alone movie, it is a small piece of the full story so don't go in thinking that everything will be explained and tied up in a neat little bow.
I am aware of the existence of the web series but have never seen any of it, and I felt it was a great standalone experience. The lack of explanation I think worked really well.
I haven't seen the movie yet. While the entire YT series is good, the part I liked best (and am most interested in going forward) was the later episodes where some mysterious organization starts exploring the Backrooms for unknown reasons. I really dug the more sci-fi X-Files / Stranger Things vibe than straight horror but the web series stopped before that direction was ever developed. It sure felt like it could be going somewhere really interesting.
To fair, the original WTF appeal of the web series' creepy Backroom vibe was great but it did start to get a little tired for me right before Kane expanded things beyond the initial "I'm trapped all alone in this endless place." But I've never been a big fan of horror plots that revolve too much around "two minutes of suspenseful creeping" building to an inevitable jump scare. Now that the movie is doing great, I'm hoping we'll get a follow-up that further develops the later parts of web series and keeps going.
I don't know, it made sense enough to me — movies don't have to explain everything to work. I actually appreciate that there wasn't a big lore dump, I don't care about any of that.
But they should do something. The first 1 hour or so was very well done and engaging, but then it just wraps up all of the sudden without digging into or addressing any of the topics they brought up.
It wasn't bad but it wasn't great either. I'd say it was an interesting YouTube series of crazy ideas to watch as a few shorts, but not enough there to warrant a movie.
I watched the YouTube series and didn't notice anything specific that it added or answered. It provided a bit more context about ASync, but that wasn't really a core part of the movie (or at least didn't actually answer anything other than they had discovered it and had been researching/experimenting with it).
Is there something I missed?
Bapr ur svtherq bhg gung vg unq orra genafcbegrq vagb n qvssrerag fcnpr, ur crgvgvbarq gur tbireazrag sbe rkgen shaqvat. Vs gur HF tbireazrag pbhyq perngr rkgen fcnpr ng jvyy, vg jbhyq or n fpvragvsvp oernxguebhtu ba gur beqre bs fcyvggvat gur ngbz naq jbhyq punatr gur jbeyq. Vg sryy haqre gur cheivrj bs gur Qrcnegzrag bs Raretl (gur fnzr qrcnegzrag vaibyirq jvgu ahpyrne jrncbaf).
Guebhtu gurve rkcrevzragf gelvat gb perngr n ynetre qbbejnl ("guerfubyq") gb n arj fcnpr, gurl pnhfrq gur snzbhf 1989 rnegudhnxr naq trarengrq gur onpxebbzf nf jr xabj gurz, qvfpbirerq gur ragvgvrf jvguva, naq jrer erfcbafvoyr sbe gur nppryrengvat zvffvat crefbaf pnfrf nf zber naq zber bcravatf orpnzr cbccvat hc.
Gurl xarj gur ceboyrz jnf trggvat jbefr, naq gurl pbagvahrq gb pbire vg hc naq pbagvahr gur rkcrevzragf, nyy va gur ubcrf bs zbargvfvat gurz be hfvat gurz gb tnva n fgengrtvp nqinagntr bire bgure pbhagevrf.
Gur zbivr fubjrq jung unccrarq jvgu bayl bar bs gubfr qbbejnlf. (naq gur qbbejnl gur frnthyy pnzr guebhtu, naq gur bevtvany guerfubyq va gur Nflap snpvyvgl).
Jr nyfb fnj gung gur onpxebbzf pbagvahrq gb ribyir bire gvzr orpbzvat zber ernyvfgvp, riraghnyyl sbezvat gur "fgvyy-yvsrf" jvgu rqvoyr juvgr znff syrfu.
Juvpu yrnqf gb gur gehr ubeebe:
Nf gur jnyy orgjrra obgu fcnprf orpbzrf guvaare ng na rire vapernfvat engr, naq nf gur onpxebbzf pbagvahrf gb ribyir, jung unccraf arkg, naq jvyy jr or noyr gb fnir bhefryirf?
That's a fascinating concept and interesting story but I didn't see it told in either the movie or the YouTube shorts. There's tons of little pieces you've referenced but neither really does more than just throw a bunch of stuff at the wall.
Basically, my concern/complaint is that there's a lot of interesting concepts there and you could pull those threads for a long time, but now of it is really developed or delivered on in either the movie or the YouTube shorts.
All of what I said (except the direct reference to the movie crossing over) came from Kane Pixel's youtube series.
Make sure you're not getting confused with random analog-horror / backrooms videos from random creators. Those videos are connected to the movie in any way.
Kane Pixels (Kane Parson)'s youtube series and the movie were both made by him and are in the same canon. It's definitely a canon where you need to pay attention and rewatch things to see the connections. It's probably the closest thing Hollywood has ever been to a House of Leaves style story.
This is where internet lore and 'YouTuber'-made movies will begin to pass stuff like Star Wars and the DCU in popularity and the mainstream consciousness. Backrooms will gross just as much as the Mandalorian movie and the upcoming Supergirl flop, if not more. Glad to see it. In terms of good will, this point was passed well over a decade ago.
The Mandalorian TV series wasn't bad but the Star Wars franchise has been in reset/turnaround for ~7 YEARS (since the last movie). It's incomprehensible that Disney bet their relaunch on a spin-off streaming series based on a tertiary character miraculously swimming back upstream from online to cinema.
The two leads are a guy you never see and a small puppet (with the big reveal new character being a CGI alien). As great as they were, C3PO, Yoda and Chewbacca couldn't have carried Empire Strikes Back as the leads. What was Disney thinking?
Andor is the now the gold standard for Star Wars productions - serious themes, adult oriented, great writing and top tier acting. The Mandalorian was definitely aimed at a younger audience.
I think Mando season 1 is what Star Wars should be. A space themed throwback to old pulp novels, cowboys and samurai and pirates, with a veneer of lasers and spaceships painted on top.
Andor is great, don't get me wrong. But Star Wars is best when it's pulp adventure stuff.
> But Star Wars is best when it's pulp adventure stuff.
This is the way. I saw the first Star Wars the week it opened as a tween and it rocked my world. Both SW and Raiders of the Lost Ark had a clear vision of building on the proven structure of the old B&W movie serials like Flash Gordon but updating them with modern storytelling tools and larger budgets. It was a truly great concept and then Empire raised the stakes higher and even better.
You're right that Mando Season 1 was an attempt to get back to the original concept and it got close. Skeleton Crew is perhaps the only other SW series where the core idea was to update a proven structure of the past in a pure and focused way - except it chose a different genre than 1930s serials. Initially I didn't know what to make of Skeleton Crew but once I got that it was building on the 1980s tween adventures like Goonies, I appreciated how it absolutely nailed what it was going for. My own kids are now older than Skeleton Crew's target audience, so it obviously wasn't for me but I applaud it as Disney's only other pure attempt at applying the 'big idea' that made OG SW great to another genre.
As a sci-fan who loved the original IP to the point of reverence, even bad Star Wars is usually at least interesting but it can also be frustrating when it evokes echoes of the OG by being set in the same universe without even trying to be great in the same ways as the OG. For example, Andor is unique in being a spin-off that is actually very good but I'd argue none of the things that make it so good require being set in the Star Wars universe. It might be even better if it had been unshackled from the rules of the Star Wars cinematic universe and was a new, original sci-fi IP.
> Andor is unique in being a spin-off that is actually very good but I'd argue none of the things that make it so good require being set in the Star Wars universe.
I think it shows the potential of using the Star Wars setting to tell a wide variety of stories. However, although I loved the original trilogy, I wouldn't class myself as a huge Star Wars fan - probably more of a Trekkie.
> For example, Andor is unique in being a spin-off that is actually very good but I'd argue none of the things that make it so good require being set in the Star Wars universe
Yes, exactly. Andor could easily have been a story of French Resistance against Nazi Germany during WW2
Star Wars is definitely at its best when it is not just being Star Wars
Well George Lucas did borrow a lot of stuff from samurai films (The Hidden Fortress being the main one), so that is a return to its roots. Personally, I think that Firefly did the cowboys in space a lot better, but maybe that's due to better writing. I did enjoy the Mandalorian, but it's a bit too shallow.
The concept in Mando is pretty much a direct rip of Lone Wolf and Cub, so I think it's really doing "Samurai in Space" more than "Cowboys"
Of course the cowboy and samurai pulp genres are pretty similar and borrowed a lot from each other. Lone Gunslinger with a code of honor versus a Lone Swordsman with a code of honor
But Star Wars was never about serious, adult themes, and great writing. It was about amazing space battles, laser swords, witty one-liners, adventure, and slapstick comedy, in a fun, kid-friendly package. Andor is a fine production. It isn't really Star Wars though.
My opinion: the closest movie, in spirit, to A New Hope is The Mummy (the 1999 one with Brendan Fraser).
You might be thinking of The Phantom Menace with its trade negotiations. The movie that Red Letter Media panned because of its focus on this plot point.
The feeble nod to politics in A New Hope mostly went over my head as a kid. It was already obvious the Empire was evil. They had a guy who choked people at a whim and another who blew up planets. The scene telling us the Emperor had dissolved the Senate meant nothing to me.
I wonder how much of this is a kind of alternate nostalgia like Vaporwave. Similar to the aesthetic draw of Severance.
Wandering around the halls of some functional institution was definitely a childhood past time of mine. Now still wondering how our parents and grandparents enjoyed private office space, lounge furniture designed by professional celebrities like Eames, and time, doing more with less. Now stuck at home or wandering in some open plan space that looks like college kids got permission to use a charge card at Ikea.
I'm convinced it's from the old JCPenny/Sears/mall back hallways that were minimally decorated that housed the photo studio and layaway filtered through the eyes of a 5 year old.
Now that Backrooms has been a hit, I wonder if we’ll ever get a House of Leaves movie, which was somewhat of an inspiration for the original backrooms lore.
I recall Danielewski sharing a spec script for a possible TV series some years ago. Appropriately, it referenced itself and treated the show as a real thing within its own universe.
In the meantime, claymation studio Laika has a faithful adaptation of "Piranesi" in the pipeline. It's more dreamlike and beautiful than gothic horror, but it does center on a similar concept of an infinite structure existing beyond physically reality that reflects human thought in enigmatic ways.
House of Leaves form of hypertextual academic satire is so firmly bound to the written word that it would be un-filmable, but you could make a film from the Navidson Record (and it would potentially be much more interesting than Backrooms).
Neither of these two movies are my jam, but I'm glad they are finding success. It's giving me hope that we're going to get a revitalized movie industry focusing on new IP and talent.
Brian McElhaney and Nick Kocher, otherwise known as the off-and-on YouTube sketch duo BriTANicK, also have two comedy films that came out in April. One they wrote, the other they wrote & directed.
omg my family we all went to see this today and we were all raging at the end. this is one of the dumbest movies any of us have ever seen. no plot. no point. complete waste of my life that i will never get back.
The what? Horror something? ....started on 4chan? Yeah, immediate aboutface here. And reading wiki articles about it that throw around words like "creepypasta" like that's widely understood?
Liminal spaces I get. Reminds of Severance. And anyways, how is this worth going to a theater for? <Shrug> A24 has done well. Is 81M considered breaching 'mainstream'? Because these niche horror things being portrayed as part of the greater 'culture' is tiring.
This is not the reaction of someone trying to keep an open mind, especially given that this isn't your usual cup of tea.
If you can get over your preconceived notions, I'd bet that you'd really enjoy this movie. It's extremely well executed and genuinely unsettling without ever getting gory, comedic or stupid.
What I find unsettling is that large swathes of mainstream society seem to consistently tack towards safe, unchallenging pablum. Why watch Parasite when you could watch a Happy Gilmore sequel?
I'm not saying this to be contrarian or give you a hard time. You should watch whatever makes you feel joy.
However, you shouldn't be surprised that for a lot of people, music, movies, television and books (I kid, I kid) that don't surprise, challenge, shock, confuse or inspire us feels vapid, hollow and intellectually insulting.
The original videos have tens of millions of views, became extremely popular memes online, and the movie is now the biggest-ever opening for an independent film. It's not niche, just a bottom-up internet-driven thing.
If it helps, there's some stratification that makes understanding it a bit confusing at first. There's basically four layers:
- The original 4chan post, a vaguely unsettling photo of an odd yellow room with an evocative caption about it being a vast realm outside reality that you can accidentally fall into to be stalked by unseen monsters.
- This post went viral and kicked off the "creepy liminal spaces" trend, where people found or created unnerving images of dark or abandoned places that are normally busy, like malls, schools, hotels, airports, etc.
- This evolved into the idea that the original yellow Backrooms is just one of infinitely-many connected environments/levels, each reflecting a different surreal aesthetic: tiled pools, children's playspaces, empty suburbs, etc. People also invented their own weird creatures that inhabited them (think the SCP Foundation stuff crossed with Five Nights at Freddy's). This resulted in an explosion of videos, wikis, and indie games exploring and expanding the concept.
- Kane Parsons created a more restrained and focused version of the above in his YouTube series, dispensing with the profusion of levels and monsters and drilling down on various first-person, found-footage explorations of the original Backrooms and glimpses of the mysterious company researching it. His take became by far the most popular, and landed him the director role for the film, which has turned out to be quite thoughtful and well-done.
I definitely recommend checking it out if you like surreal psychological horror. It's good even if you're not familiar with his web series.
A darkened theater with a glowing screen is precisely the sort of liminal space that is the topic of the movie. $20 to fall through the skin of the world for a couple hours? Seems like a no-brainer to me, given how rare and precious any liminal feeling at all is these days. And, if I go support this, maybe they’ll finally make a House of Leaves movie. One can dream.
Try seeing the movie using https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48018066 and sit in the center back row so that you can see the entire empty room as you watch it. Obviously this doesn’t work if everyone does it their first time (though I see some empty seats just a half hour away, so for evening Sunday showings it might be solidly reliable); I bet it hits different the second time too :)
I'm 150 pages away from the end of my current book. At which point House of Leaves shall become my current book. I'm looking forward to the experience.
Anyone not familiar with Kane - who was 16 when he started making his "found footage" films in Blender - the guy is a truly brilliant mind. Listening to him talk... you can close your eyes and he speaks like someone middle aged. It's almost uncanny.
Anyhow, in addition to his genuinely excellent Backrooms videos, I highly recommend you turn off the lights and take in his The Oldest View series as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjY897CCu4g&list=PLVAh-MgDVq...
He painstakingly recreated a random demolished suburban Texas mall from archival footage. It's wild how good he is at this.