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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. |