Backrooms jumps from the internet to the big screen as the creepypasta becomes a movie.
I’ll admit I wasn’t across Backrooms when the teaser trailer hit my inbox and, as you’ll shortly see, the first burst of press materials didn’t do much to alleviate that. But a little internet sleuthing shed some light on the whole dealio: first it was a 4chan copypasta, then a viral found footage series, and now – or at least shortly – it’ll be a whole feature film. But for now, let’s check out the rather opaque first trailer.
Backrooms Teaser Trailer
What’s the plot?
As the official synopsis tells us:
A strange doorway appears in the basement of a furniture showroom.
Which is taking the piss, frankly. But The Backrooms entered our reality via the medium of 4chan inspired by an old photo of a hobby store mid-renovation, and soon developed into a shared anthology about mysterious locations that abut a sort of hidden other dimension. Or, as one poster posted:
If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms, where it’s nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in
God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you
Then, Youtuber and filmmaker Kane Parsons, who is also directing the feature, was inspired to create a 23 episode found footage series with the title truncated to simply Backrooms, which Wikipedia describes thusly:
Set primarily in the 1990s, the series revolves around Async, a fictional research institute that discovers The Backrooms (in-universe referred to as “The Complex”) and attempts to study and document it. Following this discovery, missing person cases begin to skyrocket as people are pulled into The Complex. Most installments are centered around various anomalies Async comes across in The Complex.
Now, maybe the feature A24 is bringing us is drawing on those ideas, and maybe it’s not, but that’s what we’ve got to work with.
Who’s in it?
No sign of character names as yet, because god forbid a publicist makes my job easy, but prepare to see Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, Lukita Maxwell, and Avan Jogia in various states of distress.
When’s it out?
Backrooms warps into Australian cinemas on May 28.
What’s the vibe?
I love this kind of emergent, internet culture horror as a concept, but there’s a part of me that wonders if the raw sense of the uncanny that these things depend on might be softened by its journey through the studio production system. But let’s hope for the best, just for a change of pace.
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