"Backrooms": The return of greatmovies in the horror genre

Spoiler Alert with Jimmy Nichols

As the weeks slowly build toward the grand finale of Spooky Season, Halloween, we continue our watch along with some of the best new horror movies Tinseltown has to offer.

At the beginning of the month, we watched “Obsession” and saw how a new upcoming horror director, Curry Barker, transformed the genre with a new, original movie.

Now, at the end of the month, we look at “Backrooms” and see how a new, upcoming horror director, Kane Parsons, transforms the genre with a new, original movie.

“Original movie” might be a stretch because “Backrooms” is based on Parsons’s web series on YouTube with the same name. However, for Hollywood, this is a new, fresh idea, and it is something that has not been tried yet on the big screen.

The movie opens with footage of a guy in a hazmat suit, running from something in the Backrooms. This fight for survival is shown from his perspective because he has a camera in his suit.

The audience does not see what it is, but we hear the hazmat suit guy die a painful death at the hands of the creature. However, when his camera feed cuts, someone in a lab coat turns off a TV and writes down notes.

In the movie, the audience follows Clark, the owner of a struggling furniture store who aspires to be an architect. Clark is separated from his wife, who is never shown in the film, because of his drinking problem.

Clark says he works hard to pay for everything, including his wife’s law school, and stops for a drink after work because he deserves a break.

Clark is telling this story of why his wife kicked him out of the house to his therapist, Mary. While we never see Clark’s history or past, the audience gets flashbacks to Mary’s childhood.

We see how her mom was paranoid and on medication to help it, and how she watched her mom be institutionalized. Mary wants to be a therapist to help people like her mom before it is too late.

Stepping back to Clark, since he was kicked out of the house, Clark is sleeping at his furniture store. However, weird power outages and surges keep happening at the store, culminating in him discovering a portal through a wall that leads to the Backrooms.

Clark explores the new area of his store, discovering the strange rooms and how everything is slightly off. It does not take long for Clark to become obsessed with the area, wanting to understand and explore all of it.

When he tells Mary, she thinks he has finally gone crazy, prompting him to say he will film proof to prove her wrong. Clark goes to his employee’s house, asking her and her boyfriend to come to the store immediately, and with a camera.

This movie is set in the 90s, meaning the only camera used is the big, handheld one, like what a TV news reporter would use. After convincing the others to walk through the portal, which appears to be a normal wall, the three start exploring the area together.

Once again, the movie switches perspectives, shooting from the camera guy’s point of view. The movie switches the perspective a few times, and it helps add to the horror of it.

We are walking with the guy, scanning the screen from his perspective to see if there is anything dangerous about to attack him.

At one point in their adventure, the group finds a narrow, steep tunnel which leads to another room. Clark forces the cameraman to go down there, despite the protest from his girlfriend to explore.

The only thing in the room is dirty laundry, and the cameraman finds a shirt the audience saw him wear earlier in the movie. While it is hard for the audience to see from the camera’s perspective, the cameraman sees something or someone down there with him and frantically tries to escape.

He manages to escape, but the group cannot untie the rope from his waist, and all three are pulled down the chute. We do not have a clear view of who attacked the cameraman, but we do have a clear view of his body being dragged on the floor to the vent, with a trail of blood left in his place.

Without going into more detail about the plot of the movie, more people die in the Backrooms, with the therapist Mary seeing that it is real as she walks into the Backrooms because Clark left a weird voicemail.

The Backrooms the audience sees in the movies are unsettling. This is what helps make the movie scary.

The entire time we explore the Backrooms with Clark, something feels slightly off, making it impossible to feel comfortable and to settle into the movie.

Something they said multiple times in the movie to describe the alternate area was that it was like describing a dog to someone who has never seen one before and then asking that person to draw a dog. It would be close, and from a distance it might look right, but when you look at it closely, you will see it is wrong.

This is the perfect way to describe “The Backrooms.” Everything seems normal when we are looking at the rooms from a distance, but when we see the details, we find the issues.

Overall, this is a fantastic movie. The timing is great, with this being more of a psychological horror movie compared to a gory film.

Highly recommend watching this movie, especially before Halloween. It is a different type of horror movie compared to the rest you will watch in the month.