Thing On The Other Side Other The On Thing

To paraphraseth the wise sage Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon,  I'm too old for this stuff -- not the movie version of Backrooms specifically, but the whole "creepypasta" phenom that birthed it. (Honestly I think that's the first time I have ever typed the word "creepypasta" in my entire life.) Not that I'm not deeply and profoundly online, as this website you're on right now is a twenty-five-plus year testament to. But I'd never even heard of the "backrooms" thing until A24 announced this movie version of it -- I just haven't gotten around to spending weeks of my life falling down Slenderman rabbit-holes on YouTube. And to be clear -- I see this as a weakness on my part! I'm aware there is this entire section of the horror-sphrere that I'm wholly ignorant of, and I don't love that -- I'm just too old to be chasing waterfalls and windmills, so I will pick up the threads when they wind their way to out my ancient decrepit person eyes and ears at this point. (I will say I read this explainer of the origin of "backrooms" this week and it was extremely helpful.)

So anyway after I heard about the idea of the "backrooms" I did go and watch a few of director Kane Parsons shorts -- only a couple though, because I wanted to have some idea of the phenomenon without going so far as to spoil the film for myself. And I found them very creepy! And Parsons does manage to translate that creepiness to big portions of Backrooms, this here Major Motion Picture out in many a theater this weekend. There are profoundly unsettling moments in here -- the section with the rope down the chute springs to mind and sends a reverberating shudder. And Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve, both Oscar nominated and with good reason actors, do excellent work filling out sketchy emotional throughlines for their characters, which really comes to matter in the last act. I felt for both of them in exactly the ways the movie wanted me to, and I personally think the film's final shot lands with a shockwave of uncanniness that's still turning my stomach over here now thinking about it a couple weeks later. A fine and unnerving landing.

The issue (and yes, I have issues) is that -- despite all of my general ignorance on the subject of the internet's deep well of Liminal Horror that's defined The Young People Making The Horror Movies Now -- I have actually seen and adored Kyle Edward Ball's 2022 film Skinamarink. (Here is my review, which I'm contractually obligated to mention every time it comes up was quoted on Skinamarink's poster.) Ball also started out with YouTube shorts -- Skinamarink is basically a longer version of his 2020 film "Heck" -- but Ball managed to keep in place the extreme sense of alienation that these shorts wallow expertly in. And he kept it going for a full feature-length film in a way I prefer to Parsons' more mainstream (and certainly to be more successful financially) kind of take. 

Skinamarink is admittedly experimental -- I'm fully aware that most people who watch Skinamarink can't stand it. I just was never one of those people, and I fucking love the experience of losing myself into its static nightmare space for one hundred excrutiating minutes. When its scares do come, peeking their horrible eyes out from the blackness, they have wormed their ways deep into my subconsious, my being, in ways that, I gotta say, nothing in Backrooms manages. (Save that final shot. I really loved that final shot, which in an instant telegraphs an entire compendium upon the horrors of A.I. that I was not at all prepared for. A sneak attack!) 

The two films are two very different takes on the Liminal phenom, and it's not really fair to compare them -- I just think that the entire idea of Liminal Horror depends on a realization of stillness, of losing yourself into a netherworld that you're being presented with, and I personally find the tack that Backrooms takes to be somewhat less effective. Introducing us to characters, with back-stories and motivations and relationships -- you know, all the stuff that makes Backrooms a "movie" -- it's just inherently distancing. Parsons' short films didn't have to indulge that stuff -- they were, thanks to their brevity and form, able to just drop us in the scary place without distraction. And yeah -- "characters" and "stories" are probably a necesarry concession to making a twenty million dollar studio film. I don't hold it against Parsons', who made a solid and respectable and oft unnerving film. I'm just ultimately a Skinamarink girlie, I guess. Toss me off the deep end with no discernable markers whatsoever and I'm in heaven, inside that hell. Now one of you young people direct me to all the YouTube shorts I should be watching, please!