In “The Backrooms”, Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is a failed architect who runs a bland discount furniture-store, and, depressed over his divorce, gets drunk and sleeps in his shop. One day, he finds a door to a mysterious labyrinth of corridors with no apparent end.
His therapist Marie is played by “Sentimental Values” star Renate Reinsway. Struggling with her own scary childhood memories, she also ends up in creepy corridors.
At just 20 years old, director Ken Parsons has now become the youngest filmmaker in history to top the US box office with a film produced by independent studio A24.
In its opening weekend alone, the film with a production budget of $10 million has already grossed $81 million domestically and a total of $118 million in international sales, snatching the top spot from the latest film in the Star Wars franchise, “The Mandalorian & Grogu”.
Even though the film is yet to release in many parts of the world in the first week of June, it is already breaking many records. It is the strongest debut at the North American box office in history for an original horror film, and the best opening weekend for a first-time filmmaker behind a non-franchise film.
Contributing to its success is the fact that the film was spawned from a viral phenomenon that equally feels like an endless maze.
A single photo inspires a vast universe
It all started with a photo of a large, empty office cubicle with fluorescent lights and depressing yellow walls that circulated on various message boards over the last decade. Then in May 2019, it was also posted on a thread on the anonymous imageboard website 4chan.
The image was named “Backroom” in response to the post: “If you’re not careful and you stray away from reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the backroom, where the stench of old damp carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum, and about six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms with the potential to get stuck in,” the iconic post said. An entire online mythology surrounding space.
The post continued ominously: “If you hear something moving nearby, God save you, because it sure as hell has heard you.”
“Noclipping” is a term used to refer to cheat codes in video games that allow players to pass through solid surfaces. In Internet urban legends, this refers to the concept of accidentally “messing up” from reality and falling into secret dimensions.
Another useful term for understanding the Internet phenomenon is creepypasta, which is the horror story version of the Internet slang “copypasta” (from “copy and paste”), whereby entire blocks of text are copied across the Internet and become viral.
So users use these creepypastas to create different paranormal stories, and they become the digital equivalent of urban legends.
Countless fans of Backroom Creepypasta have since been posting myth-related photos on Reddit, publishing stories for fanfiction forums or creating jump-scare games for the gaming platform Steam.
Dan Erickson, creator of “Severance”, has also said that the backroom concept influenced the supernatural, never-ending office space he created in his popular series.
YouTuber Ken Pixels attracts Gen Z to movie theaters
Ken Parsons was among the fans who contributed prominently to the backroom myth.
As a teenager, he was already an experienced YouTuber; He reportedly started making “Minecraft” Let’s Play videos at the age of 9 and posting them on the channel. Then, during the COVID lockdown, he learned to use the open-source 3D computer graphics software Blender to create animated backrooms for his “Backroom” web series, which went viral.
His clip “The Backrooms (Found Footage)”, published four years ago on his YouTube channel Ken Pixels, has received over 80 million views.
The video features a young filmmaker in the 1990s who accidentally stumbles into an extra-dimensional maze of endless abandoned rooms, where hostile entities are living.
His series of 22 “backroom” YouTube videos, for example, explores how a fictional corporation’s experiments might have accidentally made the final cut, or shows a pathologist’s autopsy of an unidentified victim.
The YouTube generation is changing Hollywood’s strategy
Parsons’ prominence as Ken Pixels is seen as a key factor in “Backrooms'” record-breaking opening weekend.
The second surprise box office hit of the month is another horror film directed by 26-year-old Kari Barker, also a YouTuber. After three weekends of release, his horror film “Obsessions” has earned $148 million worldwide against a production budget of less than $1 million.
according to Diversity Magazine, the success of these YouTubers is “marking a tectonic shift in Hollywood that has shocked the entire industry.”
Against the backdrop of a 70% box office decline for “The Mandalorian & Grogu” in its second weekend in theaters, industry observers believe Gen Z is tired of constantly recycled film franchises with spinoffs, prequels and sequels.
One studio head said, “The moment has come.” hollywood reporter. “YouTube is blessing these filmmakers and we’re struggling to catch up.”
Still, Hollywood won’t be abandoning its established strategies so soon, as sequels remain in the mix: Early reports indicate that Ken Parsons will direct the second part of his record-breaking “Backrooms.”
Edited by: Brenda Haas