I probably don't need to introduce the Backrooms to anyone on the website, or even the internet as a whole. It is the staple example of the Analogue/Digital Horror genre, maybe the Mandela Catalogue or Local 58 would have something to say about that, but I don't see them getting movies anytime soon, do you? (Wait the Mandela Catalogue is getting a movie sometime in the next two years? And the creator of Local 58 was the guy who made the Candle Cove creepypasta that then got turned into a SyFy show called Channel 0 in 2017 and they two stories are vaguely connected? Why would you invalidate my point like that?) The point is now is my time to complain about analogue horror genre in a public space.
NOW DON'T GET ME WRONG, AH is very much more interesting that 90% of horror movies that come to theaters. The top three biggest AHs are so vastly different from each other story wise, and because the internet has less censorship, it is possible to explore more extreme topics which does make it easier to incorporates scares. For better and worse. The medium is also more flexible with how to express the story. AH can be done through animation, live action, text appearing over creepy photos, video games, fake websites, fucking puppets, again, for better or worse. Heck, even the old-school VHS artificing isn't necessarily required anymore. Some might claim that makes the story in question Digital Horror and not Analogue, but they are very similar not only in the way they are presented, but also in tropes they employ and themes they discuss, so they are close enough in my book. (Also splitting hairs between Analogue and Digital Horror leaves pieces like the Backrooms in a strange liminal space between them, which makes it impossible to talk about one without the other. I'm trying to cut my word count actually.) But let's stop beating around the bush, every single one of it's strengths is also a weakness.
Analogue Horror is a genre pioneered by independent developers. AH can explore some deep and hard-hitting topics! It can also lead to incredibly cringe-worthy attempts to shock the audience. AH is able to present itself in interesting new ways, leading to a greater engagement from fans! And greater disengagement from folks like me, who don't want to do a bunch of homework for a relatively simple plot. The stories are bizarre and unique! Well they were. I hate to sound like a hipster, but since AH blew up as a genre, there have been a lot of derivative works that are just a copy of the works that made it popular in the first place. How many series are just fake television shows like Local 58? How may are based on fuckin' Five Nights at Freddy's? I could honestly go on about how the genre has changed and who's to blame about the worse aspects becoming staples of the genre, but I can really just get my point across with this: For every series or video I enjoy, like Angel Hare or Blue Channel Thalasin, there's a terrible attempt at shock horror like The Painter or Tryred Witness Archives, a completely hostile viewer experience like Greylock or CH//SS, a shockingly horribly paced series like Harmony and Horror or Greylock again, or is fucking AI slop like Angel Engine or the Itch. It's a very hard genre to love. Enough of AH as a general concept though what about the Backrooms specifically?
So first I was excited. The Backrooms is a really cool and unique concept, being a level of reality adjacent to our own that is made of entirely liminal spaces and you can fall into completely randomly. And the Backrooms Movie an A24 film make 100% sense. I may not like A24 very much, but I can't deny that their movies are almost entirely the vision of their directors. Given the AH's strong indie roots, that's a good sign. But then I rewatched the Backrooms series. Actually series is generous, I watched the first 8 episodes. The first episode is fairly good, probably because it is self contained. It's not scary. The monster is just the squiggle man, kind of hard to make that frightening. But it's got good pacing and tension building, and the ending is weird enough and mysterious to keep me thinking about it without being so obtuse that it becomes stupid. Nothing happens in the next six episodes. Well, to be completely fair, a thing happens per episode. It's just super boring. Either it's a static shot of the Backrooms with people talking incomprehensibly, or it's the one episode where they open the portal to the Backrooms and nothing else happens. I got annoyed at episode 8 and stopped watching all together. A crew of ASync (They're a company that wants to exploit the Backrooms. Don't worry, neither the web series nor the movie really explains what their deal is.) guys in the hazmat suits are exploring the Backrooms... I'm getting bored of typing the name, I'm gonna start calling it the Fuck Den because I'm secretly twelve years old. Guys in hazmat suits are exploring the Fuck Den when one guy hears a crowd of people, goes to investigate like a foot down a different hallway, tries to get the rest of the team to follow him but they like can't hear him or remember he exists or something? See, that's bad intrigue. With the ending of the first episode, they don't explain what happened or why, but you get some ideas of what could have possible lead to the circumstances the video ends on. Here, I'm not even sure what happened, let alone a speculation of why or how. I'm sure if I went to a website that was hidden in the video's source code I could try to decode a blurry document using a cypher that hasn't been used since the fucking Cuban Civil War that barely explains this scene, but I don't want to do that! I'm sitting down to watch a bunch of spooky shorts for free, I don't want to have to become a Navajo Code Talker with a PHD in astrophysics and working knowledge of all computer science to get told that the Fuck Den is a spooky place to get lost in. Also, doesn't matter anyway, because then the POV character gets fucking TELEPORTED? WHEN COULD THE FUCK DENS DO THAT?
That seriously killed what little horror I had with the series. Like the Fuck Dens was already working an uphill battle for a reason I'll get to in a minute, but when it turned our that people apparently get lost not because the place is confusing and similarly laid out, but because the place can just decide to yoink you somewhere else, I was done. You lost all sense of hope about survival, and that makes horror impossible. See, before there was a sliver of hope. You (or the character you're watching whose struggle you're getting invested in) have a chance to escape. It's a slim one, but you have that chance. Maybe you'll track your movements and clip back out, maybe you'll become one of those survivalists the fans like to make up, but either way it's sad and scary when the Fuck Dens overcomes you. If it can just decide, or has a random chance, to throw you into a monster or hell, teleport you down a pit or something, how can you possibly escape or survive? Personally, I wouldn't even try. I'd just let the squiggle man kill me. That's not scary, that's just depressing!
The other, bigger thing isn't anyone's fault but my own. I don't get liminal space horror. At all. I heard people explain what's supposed to be scary, and I still don't get it. The only people who have made sense to me on this topic are Destructo Disc. This isn't me being a jackass and saying I'm too cool to be scared like in most of my other horror movie reviews, I honestly do not understand why empty hallways are supposed to be frightening or unnerving. I may not think other horror movies succeed at the one thing they are supposed to do, but I at least understand conceptually what's supposed to be frightening about something like a serial killer or a demonic possession. I get being chased by a monster, but all the Fuck Den monsters are stupid. When it's not the squiggle man it's smile.png or other vague shapes that feel like what an AI would come up with if you told it to make a creepypasta. Honestly though, that's just one more reason I wanted to watch the movie. I figured this is the best chance for me to get why liminal space is scary. I don't like being the living embodiment of that fucking Spongebob meme, GIVE ME NIGHTMARES DAMMIT!
A pirate finds an entrance to the Fuck Dens in the back of his furniture store, and the more he explores it the more insane he goes. He eventually tries to turn his therapist into his ex-wife before getting eaten by his AI doppelganger and the therapist gets black-bagged by an MRI company.
...What? Beside of my childish insistence to keep saying Fuck Dens, all of that is technically correct. The best kind of correct!
Well some of the shots were cool. I don't know how much of it was actually stagecraft and how much of it was CGI, but the Fuck Dens themselves looked pretty good. Uh... The acting is pretty good I guess, some character that got on my nerves didn't stick around long. I was laughing my ass off at the finale.
Man I never get what I want.
Well anyway, let's make this movie a meme! It's hilarious! The monsters are soo fucking goofy, how could anyone take this seriously? There are several lines like are perfect ironic joke fodder, please internet I need this. Seriously, if I can't find a GIF of Chiwetel Ejiofor scooping mashed potatoes out of AI John Goodman's stomach because "The best part is, you can eat them!", I'm resigning from the internet. I keep calling the monsters AI because I think that was the intention with there design, but don't worry they were clearly made by a human designer. They are no where near uncanny enough to be actually AI generated, which is great for getting a human a job and not destroying the planet more, but terrible for the horror prospect! And yeah, I still don't find empty rooms and slightly dim hallways scary. The movie doesn't even have the monster chasing you thing going for it since the main creature in the movie is a cartoon pirate whose animation looks like shit. A lot of the movie kinda looks terrible. The sky looks fake in every scene. I don't mean like a fake sky in the Fuck Dens, I mean the scenes that take place outside look like they are shot in front of the shoddiest green screen they could find. They must have been proud of the effect of entering the Fuck Dens, because they showcase it like three times. Too bad it's super artificial looking. There's a reason movies usually add an addition effect when something is phasing through another thing, like a blue glow. Because otherwise it looks unfinished.
So I'll be giving the movie a Recojection, right? Nope. The finale is very funny, yeah, but the first hour is super goddamn boring. Do you want to watch a drunk furniture salesman go to therapy? Yeah me neither. My buddy Chuck from the Video Booze podcast said that he one of the only things he liked about the movie was the atmosphere, but I honestly don't get what he's talking about. It's definitely trying to be creepy, and it would have had a better shot at it than the web series at least. Unfortunately the music sucks my grotesque smelly ass. It's trying to be both creepy ambience and also have element of whimsy, which clashes so hard all I'm left with in every scene is ambivalence. I also don't like the characters. The pirate is a drunken wreck who's character arc ends with him admitting he wants to be insane before getting killed, he has two college kids help him film the Fuck Dens so they can emulate the web series (which I'm pretty sure is the only reason this movie takes place in 1990) and they are super one-note and annoying before being unceremoniously killed off, and the therapist is just a confusing addition to the plot. There's also ASync, with one of their scientists who occasionally pops into the story. They are so axillary I honestly would have preferred if they just left them out entirely. It's not the most soul-crushing of slogs I've had to go through, but I do not want to do it again anytime soon.
To the Fuck Den's credit, it is keeping the spirit of Analogue Horror, and by that I mean it's convoluting a simple plot with details that aren't explained and by telling it's story in an immensely roundabout way. It fortunately doesn't make any dialogue hard to hear or make you bust out your fucking decoder ring, but I still don't understand what anything beyond the pirate's character arc was supposed to be. Why did we keep flashing back to the therapist's childhood, and what was her mother afraid of the outside for? Why are the Fuck Dens suddenly trying to encroach on reality if it's an incorrect copy of reality? Since it is an incorrect copy of reality that's apparently been around for all of time, does that mean there's like a prehistoric version of the Fuck Dens with T-Rexes with three heads or something? Why does ASync send their scientists into the Fuck Dens in hazmat suits when normal people can breathe and behave fine without them? (Assuming they can escape the monsters.) Who the hell was that guy in the opening scene? And what the fuck is with the caveman cardboard cutouts? Like we see that ASync has a bunch of them in a room at the end, so I assume they put them out to lure the monsters away from their exploration teams, but why do the cutouts have recorders that speak like four different non-English languages? Some of this stuff probably just weird for weirds sake, but they must be doing something wrong if I'm left annoyed instead of intrigued. But the bigger criticism is that, on reflection, I don't actually care about finding answers. Don't come at me with some bullshit about a hidden message if you play the last ten seconds of the credits backwards on a spectrograph that explains that the Fuck Dens are expanding outwards because Azathoth is getting an erection or some shit.
...Didn't I say I was trying to cut my word count? Anyway, bad movie, movie is bad. Only watch if you want to point and laugh. I'd feel bad about bashing a young director but not only am I in the minority of critics calling this movie bad, but I feel like he could do better. I mean The Oldest View and People Still Live Here are pretty fascinating, both look much better than this movie, and the Rolling Giant is actually an unnerving creature.
