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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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One truly gorgeous summer day earlier this month, Ben and I decided to opt in to a maze of corporate-ish empty rooms, also known as a movie theater.
To see a movie on a topic some of you threadheads may remember, back rooms. Backrooms is this kind of horror, creepypasta, or meme about a video game glitch where you can slip, or as it's called, noclip, into a video game prison of empty rooms. This all started on 4chan, which then moved to Reddit and YouTube, and then Endless Thread.
Yeah, we did an episode on the Backrooms subreddit back in 2020. And a time jump skip and a hop later, there's a major motion picture coming out on this topic.
It's directed by a young guy named Kane Parsons, who actually did a YouTube series based on the subreddit and the 4chan creepypasta before making this film.
So we headed over to the movie theater just off the Boston Common downtown. But there was a gaggle of noisy but joyful children who had no respect for our ambitions to record a little movie pregame conversation.
So we ducked into a quiet, fancy residential building with a very nice doorman that just so happened to have a little nook set up with a lamp, a table, and two chairs, almost like it was waiting just for us. Well, well, well. my old back rooms friends. We're kind of in a back room right now. Is that weird to say?
This is not what I would call a back room, but I do feel like we lucked into something. Or maybe unlocked into something.
It's kind of the opposite of the back room situation. Instead of no-clipping into a place we can't escape, we were trying to escape something. And we no-clipped into a beautiful oasis of air-conditioned quiet.
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Chapter 2: What is the Backrooms concept and its origins?
Hot day matinee summer. Yes. Set us up. Set us up. What are we doing here?
Five years ago, in the midst of COVID, you and I sat down to record an endless dread snack time.
Mm-hmm. For people who don't know the term snack time, that's just when we like tell each other stories. It's a snackier style episode as opposed to our full meal deep dive episodes.
That's right. And we were throwing stories at each other and I brought you the backroom's subreddit. How would you describe the backroom's subreddit?
Picture like yellowish, beige-ish walls. Yeah. Endless hallways and fluorescent lighting and just the buzz of the fluorescent lights. And what makes it so creepy is like the endlessness of the labyrinth, but also the absence of anything else, seemingly. Like, are there people behind the walls? Everywhere you turn, it's just more endless hallways.
There might be a creature in there.
There might be a creature. Yes. Yes.
To me, it's like a fascinating sort of horror concept because it's very video game related. And it was five years ago that the 20-year-old director... Cain Parsons. Cain Parsons.
He was supposedly, you know, in all the press where they sort of talk about this like young director who was making a YouTube horror series and is like maybe one of the youngest major motion picture directors of recent memory to release a wide release film. He was 16 years old when he got his start quotes. And that was like basically the exact time that you and I were talking about this.
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Chapter 3: How did the Backrooms transition from internet lore to a movie?
He said something interesting. I was watching an interview about the movie, which we're about to go see. Made $81 million in its first week.
Yeah. The biggest A24 box office debut ever.
But he also talked about this kind of modern feeling of unfettered urbanization, industrialization, and information overload that people have no connection to. We should test this theory as we go in to watch it. Part of the sort of horror aspect of this movie is kind of like a what hath we wrought.
piece of this kind of again sort of like feeling that we just don't have enough humans and humanity and soul to inhabit these empty spaces and these buildings that we've constructed everywhere, all over the place. So that's a thing that I'm interested in thinking about and seeing if the movie explores.
Yeah. And also, to me, what's exciting about it is that Cain Parsons is the director of this film, but he didn't write the script. And so the fact that there was acknowledgement from... You know, someone in the industry to say, hey, here's this thing that went from 4chan to a subreddit to now to YouTube to actually maybe we could make a whole movie out of this.
You just never would have seen this coming. You would never guess.
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Chapter 4: What was the experience like watching the Backrooms movie?
You would never guess that that particular, it's not even like IP, it's an open source idea of creepiness, that it would become a movie that, who knows, we could walk in and come out and be like, well, that sucked. That was a piece of trash. But I have a good feeling about it.
Yeah, me too. Hopefully we don't get too scared.
Yeah, we'll talk to you guys on the other side if we make it out.
Which we probably won't, to be honest.
See, this is, I mean, this is too colorful to be backroomsy, but yeah, hallway, no people, lots of doors. Sounds like it's still previews.
Okay, I need you guys to get me, please. Fuck, I need you guys to come out and get me. Can you talk, please, standard? Standard? Okay, so something picked up. He put down the camera. He was using it to film everything and then something picked it up. Something picked up the camera.
We made it out of the back rooms. After the break, we'll talk to some fellow escapees.
Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questrom School of Business. Ships move the vast majority of the world's goods, and it's cheaper and safer compared to trucks or planes.
So the shipping was there centuries, and it will remain there in the future.
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Chapter 5: How does the director's background influence the film?
Yeah.
One thing that I'm gathering from just the little bit of Reddit feedback that I've seen, people in the backroom subreddit so far, a very good point that was made is that at least our understanding of backrooms is that you're not supposed to be able to get out. You're in, it's a labyrinth, you can't find your way out, but this idea of someone tying a rope to you and being able to pull you out...
feels um like not true to the nightmare that is back rooms yeah that's that's a good point and i feel like it's also it's also this like challenge that you have with a movie like this which again it's sort of like most horror movies that i've seen and with at least one person getting out So I think it sort of makes sense in a way that some people have to escape.
Okay, well, what do you take away from this experience?
I'm going to go back to the thing that Cain Parsons, like, talked about, or Cain Pixels, if you follow him on YouTube, which is this, like, there's an aspect of horror that we all feel from this sort of endless construction of
of humanity and the fact that we are in a world where a lot of the things that we are making ultimately are not you know they're they are uninhabited um and there's something very soulless about that and so to me there's yeah that's what I take away from it is this kind of like
Something, something, capitalism, modern society, lots of homeless people with nowhere to live, but we've got lots of empty buildings. I don't know. That's the part of it that sort of resonates with me. What about you?
Well, you know, mental illness is a theme throughout the movie. And the characters, at least the two main characters, have some connection to either personal experience or connection to mental illness.
And therapy too, right? And do you feel like therapy is treated... How do you think the movie views therapy?
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Chapter 6: What themes are explored in the Backrooms film?
This is not the only thing that's going to be going on. Aviation is seeking to do the same thing, maybe even faster. And the other uses of petroleum are all transitioning quickly. You may think, and in some ways that makes the problem even bigger. There are other ways that it makes it easier. Some of the fuels that are used for shipping are very similar to those used for aviation.
So as infrastructure gets built out, shipping can benefit.
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