Director: Kane Parsons
Cast: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett
Have I Seen it Before: Nope. Haven’t seen the youtube series, either. But I’m bound by blog magic to acquiesce to any special requests made*.
Did I Like It: And I was willing to say that a large part of my distraction during the film is that I was not in on the whole mythology, wondering if this was how most people felt when they watched a Star Trek film.
But I’m not sure there even is any sort of deeper mythology here. The internet would be tripping over itself to tell me how the story of the film ties in with the web series, which in turn would tie in to the originaly memeification of the original 4chan posts.
Wait a minute. I watched a horror movie based on a meme? I watched a horror movie originally, sort of, even arguably based on 4chan posts?
All right.
The titular backrooms are set up to be a slow pitch down the middle for a novice horror movie cinematographer. Move the camera slightly in almost any direction and something can leap out of the shadows. That’s fine. I don’t have a problem with jump scares. They work, and work more reliably than almost any other scare tactic in the movies. Over-using them can be a problem, but piling them one on top of another like a warehouse of BOO! renders a film as just one long repeat of the last few minutes of The Blair Witch Project (1999). Even that’s not the worst approachfor a horror movie—the last few minutes of Blair Witch are the only ones that really approach working—but eventually I stop asking “What the hell was that?” and say “Oh. It’s a pirate. He wants to sell me a bedroom set, or bite me in the shoulder. Got it.”
*Feels like maybe I shouldn’t have revealed that.