I saw a post speculating about the possible impact from the back rooms movie. Do you think there will be any long term effects on the movie industry?
i'm old enough now to have witnessed a fair few moments like this, where a hot young upstart breaks in and does the unexpected if not presumed-impossible and everyone's left thinking "nothing will ever be the same!" and then time passes and everything mostly stays the same. so i'm skeptical of the hype in that sense, that this is gonna be a huge turning point for hollywood. historically they always learn the wrong lessons and end up backing the worst horses because the industry (by and large) isn't run by artists, it's run by the same type of business boy who runs every other corporation.
i actually saw Backrooms last night and, much to my surprise, i kinda loved it? i'm grading it on a curve, naturally, there are a lot of nits one could pick with the script and story construction-- but the vibes, the atmosphere, the visuals, the themes, it all really came together for me and resulted in a film that's a lot of fun to talk about. it isn't just competent or, like, "good for a movie directed by a 19 year old," it's genuinely one of the better horror films i've seen in a long time. all those nits i mentioned didn't really bug me too much in the end because most of them are just The Parlance Of Contemporary Horror, your jump scares and spooky monsters and handholdy on-screen flashbacks to the movie you are currently watching etc. the presence of these things annoyed me, but compared to how those same quirks are deployed in most mainstream horror movies Backrooms comes across as downright restrained.
the reason it's good is that they got Kane Parsons to make this flick. he's not bandwagoning from the outside, he's very clearly iterating on and advancing his prior body of work. this is a shockingly mature debut feature, maybe because working in blender for the shorts meant he as a filmmaker never had to struggle with "budget constraints" the same way every other indie horror director did in the past before getting that first big studio paycheck. so when they made that jump, they went big and loud and stupid with all the effects they could afford, and sometimes it worked but often it didn't. what Parsons used that check for was to build a giant backrooms set and just let us sit in it for a while. this is not a kid getting all the toys out of his toybox on the big stage, you know? this is someone who has been thinking deeply about his work and the medium of film (in the post 3D video game era) for a long time, and i think that shows in all the interviews with him and the rest of the cast/crew.
so here's the deal. they made this thing on a ten million dollar budget and it's already passed 100 million in revenue. that's huge and it's only gonna get bigger. crazier still, the movie is actually good. i think it's gonna have some cultural staying power, or at least discursive staying power. let's call it zoomer It Follows.
and that's a fucking miracle. A24 hit the fucking jackpot beyond all reasonable expectation with Kane Parsons. so now studios are gonna be looking to youtube and seeing who else might have similar gas... but uh. who... does? does anyone? i mean, anyone with the kind of built-in audience that Parsons does? the fnaf movies are trash and sure they made money but they're companion works to the games, subservient to them to the point of self-annihilation outside the property's already-extant audience. Backrooms the film has no such baggage, it just is what it is and anyone can get the full experience with zero knowledge of the wiki or the lore or what the fuck ever else (as it should be). what else is gonna be like that? is michael bay's skibidi toilet gonna be like that???
there is, no doubt, an immense untapped talent pool on youtube, a veritable eden of aspiring filmmakers stuck making tiktok shorts and video essays and podcasts, all of them desperate for an ounce of institutional support to help them realize a vision. but the studios aren't gonna go for the cool interesting weird creators that fly under the radar. they're not on the lookout for the next David Lynch, and they're not even on the lookout for the next Spielberg either (heirs apparent JJ Abrams and Gareth Edwards pretty well nailed the coffin shut on that one i think). they're looking for someone with a big enough audience that the creator can do most of the marketing for them. they won't care what it is or why it's successful, and more often than not they will cut the original creator out of the equation as much as possible because that's what studios do. Kane Parsons is a generational exception whose example will be used to prove the rule for the foreseeable future. like Christopher Paolini publishing Eragon at age 18 (everyone always cites 15 because that's how old he was when he started writing it, but any good writer will tell you that you don't actually start writing a book until you're about three quarters of the way through writing it), adults everywhere are gonna say look! look! he was just a kid and he succeeded! anyone can do it!!
but, no, not anyone can do it. these things are subtly gated, even before you get to all the obvious stuff, by education, training, technology access, etc. the more money you come from, the more likely you are to have the time and resources to make art from a young age. but also, they didn't pick up Paolini or Parsons because the art was good, they did it because they were popular. i wrote tons and tons and tons of stuff that was probably at least as good as the Eragon cycle when i was in high school, but i didn't have parents who could help me self publish that shit, they couldn't drive me to bookstores to do appearances, they didn't have connections to help give me a boost. if i sent my manuscripts off to a publishing house or agent, who'd look at them? filmmaking is the same way. you can make an amazing indie movie that everyone who sees it loves, but if the right people don't see it it won't matter. to be seen, you have to relentlessly devote yourself to creating as many opportunities for your thing to get seen in the hopes that sooner or later lucky will smile on you. Paolini got lucky. Parsons got lucky. that's not to diminish the work either of them put in, i'm just saying that the work itself is unfortunately a much smaller part of the equation than we'd like to believe.
and, also, i'm not gonna lie i developed a bit of a resentment for Paolini precisely because his "inspirational" example was ultimately just a cudgel adults used to make me feel bad for not already being a successful writer before even being old enough to vote. like, well, you're missing the window every year, sooner or later you're gonna have to make a choice and decide whether you're gonna be destitute for the rest of your life or if you're actually gonna get a real job. you're either a wunderkind savant or you're a hopeless poser. the latitude collapses. when you're pressured to be economically successful before you even have enough life experience to really truly make art about anything real, you naturally end up living less so you can work more, so your work becomes increasingly solipsistic because it IS your life, it IS "what you know", and so you either burn out from guilt of not being able to live up to that one impossible example, or you mold yourself to that example and close yourself off from experiences that would give you your OWN voice, your OWN life to draw from. artists need time and space to develop their practice, most people don't start making shit they really like until well into their thirties, but the obsession with Young Talent inherently casts them in a light like they've somehow been wasting time? so, yeah, i feel for all the young filmmakers who're now gonna be brow-beaten for not already being the next Kane Parsons.
and you know, i think Parsons is a very naive director. his vision of the 90s is profoundly post-2008, and the characters are broad sketches of stock archetypes elevated by generally very good performances. but these weaknesses work in Backrooms because that sense of uncanny, half-remembered history IS the mechanism that makes the whole thing work. it's a subject matter uniquely suited to the inexperienced naivety of a director as young as Parsons, and that's an arrangement that can pretty much ONLY work with this specific film. if it tried to be more conventional or, god forbid, grounded, i think it'd be a huge pile of shit. and "grounded, conventional" films are the ones that studios are gonna greenlight ninety nine times out of a hundred. also, ten million dollars is a microscopic budget and it's very easy to justify building a 30,000 square foot set when literally all you need is flat yellow surfaces and florescent lights. no other setting of this magnitude has such an inherent cost-saving property, that you can do so much with so little.
so what's gonna change in the industry? like i've said, Backrooms is so itself that very little about it can be directly replicated without losing the reason it works in the first place. risks will probably be taken with one or two more insanely young internet-famous creators, and they're almost certainly gonna be disasters. most likely we'll be getting a wave of liminal space horror (which was already in motion long before even Parsons' original backrooms videos) that'll be cheap, focus-tested to crap, overmanaged by the studio, and designed with an eye towards establishing new IP. most of it will be crap. we're also gonna keep seeing this trend of movies that gesture at big ideas but directly say very little, leaving it to the content creators to make that stuff explicit. which is shrewd in some ways, i think, given the digital culture of today, but i also think these movies have a bad habit of trying to let the audience make up their own mind while also holding their hands the whole way through. overstatement of themes in some places, understatement in others. again, this is a trend that long predates Backrooms, but it's still here. i think studios prefer movies like this where you can derive a lot of capital-critical messages from them, but YOU have to do that work on your own time. this ain't I Love Boosters making dialectical materialism a literal plot device, you know what i mean? there's a reason Boots Riley has had to fight and scrape to get his second feature made for yeaaaaaars, whereas A24 came knocking at Parsons' door sight unseen.
mostly i think it'll be same old same old. the subjects will change, there will likely be novelty in the execution that will be more momentarily captivating than actually substantial, and in the end the overall trend of corporate filmmaking's decline will remain unchanged. a single movie cannot change the industry because it was made BY and FOR the industry. the hollywood new wave didn't happen because everyone saw Easy Rider and Taxi Driver and went "fuck, we need to make more movies by talented creators with low budgets", it happened because the federal fucking government issued the paramount decision and broke the vertically integrated monopoly that'd filled the theaters with massive overwrought musicals that audiences were broadly pretty fucking sick of. the only force that can change hollywood is a force coming from outside hollywood imposing change by force. until private equity is abolished and the profit motive ceases to be the only motive, the only thing that's gonna change is that a new generation of creators will get to experience being fucked over by the industry.
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