Backrooms is one of the two tiny budget pseudo-indie horror movies rampaging across the box office right now. It’s also the latest iteration of director Kane Pixels’ longterm exploration of the concept. Alasdair Stuart threw on a hazmat suit and dived into the first half of the YouTube videos to date. You can find the play list here:

 

 The Backrooms (Found Footage)

‘Sound, camera,’

‘We’re rolling.’

‘Aaand action.’

The first words in the Backrooms are spoken by director Kane Parsons, shooting a horror movie with friends. He takes a step back and stumbles into…something. An infinite maze of yellow, abandoned conference halls.

This first nine-minute video is full of the quiet, oddly beautiful and increasingly tense halls of the Backrooms. It’s essentially a demonstrator for the series, with an absolutely killer final shot and some moments of careful menace.

Mar11_90_ARCHIVE.tar

Gentle music and the phrase ‘DATA NOT ACCESSIBLE… REFORMATTING…’ greet us for the second visit to the Backrooms. Circuit diagrams and static images of impossible rooms. Lab spaces indistinguishable from the backrooms themselves and images hinting at the geography of the place, how it barely functions and that, perhaps, someone is trying to control it. One of the most atmospheric, non narrative videos in the series.

The Third Test

Infodump galore! Async, the MRI company who are researching the Backrooms, get some background here and it’s banal, evil and… unsurprising. Async have been tasked by the US government to colonise the Backrooms. Infinite space, no residential costs. Only occasional demons.

First Contact

We stay with Async for the next video with footage of a turbine test in the Backrooms that seems to be trying to create and define space. We see the Gateway created in the previous video (And that it’s heavily implied Mary is taken back to the world through at the end of the movie) as it fires, keeps firing and suddenly… we’re there. A stable doorway to an infinity of yellow corridors.

faultline.mov

We open on archive video of the 1989 California earthquake which both grounds the series in time and ties the events to the real world in a very clever way. The implication is that either the earthquake ripped the first gateway to the Backrooms open, or Async’s test caused the earthquake.

Missing Persons

A series of missing persons posters slowly give way to a graph of missing persons that skyrockets in 1989 before we’re back to the Async gateway and people in hazmat suits making their way through the Backrooms. They stop as they find what seems to be an immolated body covered in fungus.

Autopsy Report

The expedition makes it out, and brings the body with them. We learn in short order that the individual died five days ago, somehow from malnutrition but the body hasn’t decomposed quite right.  Parts of it were sustained by the fungus…

Backrooms-Informational Video

One of the longest videos starts as an Async training film that gives us the name Backrooms as a canonical term and then goes all the way sideways. An Async team go in, one of them gets separated and we see the rooms incise him into what seems to be a different time period, complete with a long established Async control room in the Backrooms. One we glimpse in a previous video…

Motion Detected

It’s March 1990 and Async have moved in. The Backrooms are full of construction and motion operated cameras. Pay close attention to the one we glimpse in the opening here, there’s a fan theory that a curdled version of this is the monster we see glimpse in the first video.

We see a grid diagram showing Async have set up motion operated cameras covering every angle of their initial entry point into the Backrooms. We then see a compilation of motion alerts, all from the same night. We see Async researchers come and go, staff work in and around the cameras and then the Threshold closing for the night. What follows is noises, industrial clanking, the sound of something heavy being dragged along then, for a split second, what seems to be someone floating into view in the distance.

Prototype

We’re flashing back to 1982 and work done under the supervision of one Doctor Philip R Heymann, who may well be the Phil we see in the movie. Eight beam generators arranged in a circle fire and in a very similar effect to what we saw when the threshold opened, we get a flash of familiar yellow light.

Pitfalls

We’re much further along in Async’s research now. There’s a staging room with breathable air directly inside the Threshold and it seems to be the room we glimpse at the end of Informational Video. No idea if Mark, the hapless researcher who was thrown forward in time made it. His team, however, dd! Marvin E. Leigh becomes the main protagonist of the series and, alongside fellow researchers George and Kim has the worst time here. Finding a room full of angled pitfalls, he explores and is startled by a sudden distortion and falls down one of the pits. Exploring, he hears screaming, investigates and finds what seems to be an outdoor, night time street, complete with stars. As he investigates, he hears screaming and in one of the most chilling moments so far, sees what’s causing it. The image of something made of wires and pain, screaming in pain and rage at the far end of a misty corridor, is one of the best in the series so far.

Report

‘That’s not a person.’ Marvin’s terrifying realisation from the previous video opens our first in a while to be out of the Backrooms. There’s a pretty major budget upgrade here as we get actual cast members and step out of the 1990s VHS aesthetic. We see researchers watch Marvin’s mission camera and realise with absolute certainty and terror that the Backrooms are not empty, and what’s in there is not friendly. We also get a good look at the image, which seems to confirm that the monsters are tripods with camera shaped heads, resembling the motion triggered cameras we’ve seen put in place earlier.

This one’s a little light on plot but surprisingly big on consequence. We see a series of still images as Async respond to Marvin’s contact with the creature by putting up a wooden barrier to that section and blast shutters in the control room past the Threshold. Most interesting is the fact none of the workers doing this are in hazmat suits, suggesting the air has been cleaned this far in.

9780415263573

A UK motorway is shown. The footage repeats in slow motion and zooms in as we see a car disappear into the Backrooms. More gateways, opening everywhere, just like Phil says in the movie.

Backrooms-Presentation

Async make their pitch for how to use the Backrooms. This is fascinating, a corporate video selling the idea of the Backrooms as rapid transit system cut with the growing unease at Async. In a series of early ’90s CGI graphs we see that they’re selling it as ‘A-Space’, an infinite corporate Valhalla that will solve every need from Industrial processing to storage and warehousing and, of course, cubicle farms. One of my favourite beats is seeing the pitfalls from a few videos ago fenced off as ‘safe’ attractions near a monorail station. Eternal, internal corporate America, complete with decor and entirely convincing artificial sunlight.

But the meat of the video lands as we return to the Threshold and watch as corporate bigwigs take their first steps through into the Backrooms, marvel at the models and plans Async have and… the alarms go off and… it’s Mark! From Informational Video! He DID travel in time!

Simpsons

A clip from an early Simpsons episode (‘Bart Gets Hit By A Car’) is cut with an advert for Dimacol, a cough medicine. The episode is from 1991, the ad is from 2000 and this is an odd one. My guess is it’s setting up the idea Mark is essentially both Bart and Homer, harmed by his employer and owed damages he may not get.

 

Find the complete Backrooms to date, discounting the movie, here. Enormous thanks to edit user Domachino for putting the chronological list together,