Portal Problems: A Web Series Becomes a Weird and Effective Horror Film with ‘Backrooms’

Portal problems: A web series becomes a weird and effective horror film with ‘Backrooms’

Chiwetel Ejiofor gets lost in the caverns of his mind—and some mysterious, warehouse-like portals—in Backrooms, one of the weirdest horror films of the decade. Writer-director Kane Parsons, who has been posting videos—including a web series with the same name—involving backrooms on YouTube over the past few years, brings his ideas to the big screen in a film with a vibe similar to that of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. The film is set in the ’90…

Backrooms - Liminal horror with a plot! - ScullyVision

The Backrooms, the YouTube series upon which the latest A24 horror flick is based, is not at all plot-driven. Sure, some mythology can be mined from it over the course of its collective 2.5 hour runtime, but for the most part, the poster child for liminal horror is all about aesthetics and, as the kids say, vibes. The series began when its creator, Kane Parsons, was just 16, and in the years since its inception, it has grown into a cult curiosit…