don't tap the glass and definitely don't touch the animals
dir: Kane Parsons
2026
This is, thus far at least, one of the best and most successful horror flicks of the year, springing as it does from what I would have thought was one of the less likeliest places to arise from, being a series of Youtube videos that have been watched tens if not hundreds of millions of times.
Though of course there are cute cat videos that have billions of views, so let’s hope they don’t get their own franchise.
Why this all seems so unlikely is that around 4 years ago a sixteen year old kid started making these creepy videos, a mixture of ‘found footage’ stuff filmed with video cameras and 3D stuff made with Blender and Adobe After Effects (and a lot of heavy breathing and someone saying “what the fuck?” every few seconds), and a legend was reborn. I say ‘reborn’ because all of this is dredged from the depths of the internet itself, iterations of iterations, copies of copies, but this version really got a lot of eyeballs and fans, regardless or because of its creepypasta origins.
In what I regard as a curious trajectory, the success of The Backrooms online meant that a studio, being A24, offered this 19-year-old (he’s now 20) ten million dollars to turn this concept into a feature length movie, and a certain percentage of the people who viewed and loved his stuff on Youtube turned out and made this flick a tremendous success.
And the baffling thing (for us oldies) is that all the film references we would make or would think must have been relevant for this director and this production, are not. We are going to mention Kubrick and David Lynch and maybe Tarkovsky or movies like Skinamarink or The Blair Witch Project, or Severance and if Kane Parsons was listening to us, he’d probably tilt his head to the side quizzically as to the references, never having seen or heard of them.
He’s coming from a different place. It resonates with the youngs because it comes from a different place.
You know that I can’t avoid pretentious blather when it seems relevant. So the phrase I’m going to repeat, that has also been used in a million videos, is “liminal spaces”, or a “the fear or the horror of liminal spaces”. In between places. Open plan office spaces. Office spaces in general. Office spaces specifically. Places that seem unnatural even when nothing specifically or obviously creepy is happening.
Spaces painted in colours and patterns no one should ever have agreed to. Hallways and doorways, wherever there is a recess in shadow, meaning there is something always lurking potentially somewhere. And there is, something, somewhere, but even seeing glimpses of things is not as unsettling as these spaces.
This may sound like low-budget nonsense but it’s nothing of the sort. There are respected, admired, credible actors in this. The great Chiwitel Ejiofor is our main character / victim Clark. The great Renate Reinsve, who had a great year last year with Sentimental Value, does paralysing work here as an incredulous counsellor. The okay Mark Duplass also appears briefly.
To borrow from the film, trying to describe it is like trying to describe a dog to someone who’s never seen one before, and then expecting them to draw one. There’s the world, and then there might be a whole level of reality behind it. But what if that reality is a reflection of our own memories, of our own unhealthy patterns and unbreakable cycles, ones that we repeat over and over again? What if there is, like we always suspected, a place where only one of our socks at a time or our car keys slip through the cracks of our reality and drop into, all this unwanted stuff piling up into layers of distorted reality lasagnes?
Clark is a very angry man. He has a terrible furniture store, with a terrible logo and mascot, and even worse tagline. In the ultra cheap ads for his business, he plays Cap’n Clark, some kind of peg-legged mangled pirate, but the place is called Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire. Merging two completely incompatible motifs into one unholy melange, it compounds failure with cringe.
His counsellor tells him that he is trapping himself in patterns of his own construction, being unable to see that his behaviour is the one common denominator in everything that keeps seeming to go wrong, but he has bigger problems to wrestle with now: he spies a gap in a wall that leads to another area, an impossible place. We already know that there might be terrible things lurking in this space, because before Clark ever came along we watched a ‘found’ video of some guy stumbling around in a hazmat suit carrying a camera as something goes after him.
But Clark has his own, personal, demons.
His counsellor Mary (Renate Reinsve) has her own problems, too. I mean, Clark is an arsehole of a client, but she seems to have her own deep-seated trauma arising from the fact that her mother was terrified of the outside world and had to be institutionalised, or the fact that her childhood home was demolished to make way for a Boost juice. She carries a physical reminder of this loss, in the form of a plaster cast of a handprint she made in the concrete in front of the house.
We watch her as she watches forlorn from the vantage point of memory as workers destroy the house and everything near it. There are so many shots of that plaster cast that you would think the plaster cast must play some vastly important role later on.
She almost doesn’t matter. Clark almost doesn’t matter. The Backrooms, as a phenomena, isn’t dependent on characters, backstories and personalities, because it’s about the dread created or induced by walking around in these spaces, and then the terror of something wanting to harm you as you desperately try to get away from them while careening around in these spaces.
There is a lot of talk about the ‘vibe’ they try to achieve with this, and while I’m too old to use the term the way it’s (over)used these days, the success or failure of this flick is entirely dependent on the mood it generates and sustains. It very much generates a tone and a mood for much of its length, and that’s at least from my perspective where the flick succeeds tremendously.
What I don’t need is explanations, but I guess that part of it is endemic to the series of short flicks this arises from. There are hints of the bigger picture, the greater Complex and its origins in a MRI company’s experiments with creating magnetic fields somehow causing this phenomena or at least opening these portals, but I don’t care nothing for that nonsense. I don’t need a nightmare to make logical sense, and this nightmare very much does not need to.
At first when I watched these acting heavyweights (as in, they’re both tremendous actors: I’m not commenting on their weight class in boxing) I felt like their sessions were somewhat actorly and forced, but when they are repeated later on, it clicked, and I got it. It made sense, and it makes the jump from internet shorts to feature make a bit more sense and resonate in a different way.
I am going to guess that if anyone asked Kane Parsons or Kane Pixels, as he used to call himself, as to whether he ever watched the original Blair Witch Project, he’d politely say no, but there is much to imply here that he has a strong handle on the whole ‘found footage’ camera-as-first-person-participant in what’s happening genre of horror flicks. I’d especially wonder as to whether he’s watched the V/H/S series as well, because he seems to grasp the main conceit of these types of flicks, because of the lament of countless cinemagoers bellowing “why would any regular person be filming this, and why wouldn’t they have stopped filming 14 jump scares or murders ago?”
There is a great, truly great moment, and to me it indicates what a great handle Parsons has on this genre, because he has that moment when a character, being Clark, who’s been running around terrified with a camera filming what they’ve been seeing, finally drops the camera (of course in the perfect spot for composition purposes). A whole scene follows, but then, whatever it was that was chasing Clark, catches up with him, and it doesn’t attack Clark, it picks up the fucking camera and keeps filming!!!
I tell you, I almost had a seizure. Zane Parsons, you are too clever for your own good.
This flick is pretty great at achieving what it sets out to achieve, even as some parts of it look silly or deliberately low rent. It’s definitely not about the antagonists, who are pretty freaky in their own right, but it is very much in alignment with our terror towards unnatural, inhuman environments.
8 times stay out of the Backrooms as long as you can out of 10
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“We all have our loops. Our habits. Behaviours that keep us walking in circles. Reaching for the same solutions over and over again. Thinking each time will take you somewhere new, but they don't.” – the labyrinth within - Backrooms
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