"Backrooms" review — Internet ghost story is prime material for disquieting horror
“It’s beautiful, am I right?” Kane Parsons’ Backrooms , the filmmaker’s debut feature, is inextricably tied to its origins as a 4chan post, in which a photo of a cleared-out retailer in Wisconsin was repackaged as an extradimensional piece of “no-clipped” reality. And now, this anonymous post combining an old photo with two sentences of flavour text has led to a number one box office. While discussing the origins of Backrooms, one also learns that director Parsons is only twenty years old. After his high school filmmaking project went viral on YouTube, a series of found-footage shorts about scientists and their explorations into the “backrooms,” the then-grade twelve student was offered a gig by A24 to produce a feature film expanding on the series. The film is a byproduct of the Gen Z internet virality, both in anonymous posting and the power of YouTube audiences. But let’s get the metatextuality out of the way. So what? So what that the film is based on an internet post? So what that...
