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Movie Review: 'Backrooms' goes from internet meme to the big screen
Kane Parsons directs a fitfully unsettling horror film that struggles to turn a 2019 4chan meme into a sustained story.
- A24 greenlit 20-year-old YouTuber-turned-filmmaker Kane Parsons' Backrooms adaptation, bringing the internet-born horror concept to theaters Friday, May 29, rated R by the Motion Picture Association for language and violent content.
- An anonymous 4chan post in May 2019 sparked the Backrooms phenomenon with an unsettling image of a vacant Oshkosh, Wisconsin furniture store; users expanded it into collaborative creepypasta fiction through references to video game 'noclipping' into liminal spaces.
- Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Clark, a divorced failed architect and furniture store owner who discovers a portal behind his store's walls leading to an impossible, ever-replicating space where fluorescent corridors contain piled furniture and something unknown lurks.
- Despite a paper-thin concept, Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve deliver standout performances, with Ejiofor embracing fevered mania and Reinsve bringing slinky intelligence to her first horror film, capturing Lynchian aesthetics in suburban America's sinister underbelly.
- Unlike failed creepypasta adaptations such as Slender Man, Backrooms succeeds by requiring no prior internet knowledge, leaving lingering unease in a spectacle-based film environment where most movies are forgotten before audiences leave theaters.
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12 Articles
12 Articles
The IndependentReposted by 
The Independent (US)
The Independent (US)This 4chan-inspired horror movie will define a new generation of filmmakers – review
Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve star in 20-year-old filmmaker Kane Parsons’s eerie, fascinating exploration of liminal spaces
·London, United Kingdom
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Backrooms is the best horror movie since Weapons
Horror fans who aren’t already well-versed in the viral “Backrooms” creepypasta may have a hard time understanding, at first glance, why a bunch of empty rooms with yellow wallpaper and fluorescent lighting are inherently creepy enough to drive an entire movie. They may also wonder why A24 initially chose to market that movie, Backrooms, with a teaser that simply pans down floor by floor through a series of those rooms.
Coverage Details
Total News Sources12
Leaning Left7Leaning Right0Center3Last UpdatedBias Distribution70% Left
Bias Distribution
- 70% of the sources lean Left
70% Left
L 70%
C 30%
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