And the best part is… you can eat them.


tl;dr

  • +1 spooky rooms
  • +1 Minotaur referenced
  • -5 Minotaur was a giant pirate mascot monster
  • +2 first 45 minutes were scary
  • -2 last 45 minutes not enough scary
  • -1 the “researchers”
  • +1 patient and therapist characters’ story together outside of the store, and generally their great acting
  • -1 House of Leaves knockoff
  • +1 as close as we’re gonna get to a House of Leaves movie
  • +1 other ppl getting dragged into believing (my favorite part of mystery stories)
  • -1 he started eating ppl that fast??
  • +2 cursed breaker box


Backrooms was scary enough during the first half that it could’ve stuck to that, given the audience a scary monster reveal climax (RIP our hero), and satisfied the simple goal of: I will scare you for an hour plus.

But Backrooms created the expectation of some deeper psychological reveal—a thesis—and as soon as it did that, it promised more than scares. It promised meaning, a revelation about the characters, about us.

It didn’t follow through on that. I don’t think Backrooms really knew what its ending meant.

Not necessarily bad. Is that better than being sure about itself and just doing the ending poorly? I don’t know. Still not great.

*

When a story presents a mystery, the audience wants:

a) an answer that’s original and/or unpredictable, or…
b) no answer at all, and the satisfaction that the journey was all the fun.

Either can be good. It’s a red flag when a story tries to do both, to compensate for a weakness in one by adding the other.

*

Scary monsters and magic wall-doors are great. Handheld jump-scares and unnerving corporate architecture, all cool with me. I was having a great time. The scary stuff was scary.

Then suddenly the monster is him. Our hero’s own self. His failure? His lack of control? His fear and anger over his lack of control?

Could be interesting ideas. But it all got… silly. A silly pirate mascot monster1 bumbling through the endless hallways, a silly climax chase scene, and plates of gooey person-stuffing being served for dinner after the guy spent, what, a couple weeks down there?

And the monster is… him?

Then it’s all a bit obvious. He’s in therapy, he’s unfulfilled, he’s drinking too much, he’s been evicted from his space.

So he finds a new space, where he’s in control, and he likes it.

Okay, psychological metaphor. But also there’s a team of researchers investigating doors to this place popping up around the world. So it’s real. But also it’s our guy in there as a big ol’ pirate monster terrorizing the rooms. Also the therapist had a traumatic childhood.

*

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You uses its monster (the hole) to represent difficult feelings—the hopelessness and powerlessness of a mother who feels she can’t keep her sick child safe, and who feels alone in the struggle. It’s more nuanced, not silly at all, and it at least leaves you to ponder these things.

Undertone sets up a pure-horror Paranormal Activity-type scary ghost movie. But by the end it hasn’t actually been that scary. Then it tries to compensate by going deep—layering the story with the podcaster’s dying mother, and also there’s suddenly an implication that the protagonist is an alcoholic because in one scene she drinks alcohol. This followed by a climax that I can only describe as a lot of noise and shaky camera visuals and sensory overload, like it’s trying to hide the lack of an actual ending by dropping us down a flight of stairs and hoping the concussion blacks out the rest of the movie.

If the scale is If I Had Legs at the top as “pretty good” and Undertone at the bottom as “bad. period.”, I’d put the first half of Backrooms just below the top and the second half right up against the bottom.

Disappointed that it didn’t stay scary when it very well could have sent me home to sleep with the lights on (and forever avoid eerie hallways and magic doors).

If nothing else, it made me want to read House of Leaves again.

  1. I also couldn’t get into Nosferatu (2024) despite it being visually beautiful and despite wanting to get lost in that creepy world because he was just so silly. ↩