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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Back Rooms is a horror movie about some of the creepiest places imaginable. The nondescript beige carpeted rooms that populate countless office spaces and discount furniture warehouses. If you've ever worked in a rundown office park or shopped for a cheap mattress, the vibe will be instantly familiar.
dingy, claustrophobic, maybe with cheerful music piped through tinny speakers, and always with the unsettling flickering hum of fluorescent lights. That setting forms the central concept of Back Rooms, which doesn't have a plot so much as a deeply unnerving sense of place. It's a surreal and unsettling bit of horror based on a popular YouTube series. I'm Stephen Thompson.
Today we are talking about Back Rooms on Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR.
Brazil used to have one of the fastest growing economies in the world. People called it the country of the future. There are songs. O Brasil é o país do futuro. Because it seems like we have it all, man. But then the music stopped. On the Planet Money podcast, a lot of countries these days aren't rich. They aren't poor. They're just kind of stuck in the middle. Why is that?
Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
Joining me today is Jordan Cruciola. She's a writer and producer and the host of the podcast Feeling Seen on Maximum Fun.
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Chapter 2: What is the concept behind the horror movie Backrooms?
Hey, Jordan. Hello. Thank you so much for having me back. It is a pleasure. Also with us is freelance music and culture journalist Rihanna Cruz. Hey, Rihanna. Hey, Stephen. Happy to be here. Great to have you. So in Back Rooms, Chiwetel Ejiofor plays the manager of a pirate-themed discount furniture store called Cap'n Clark's Ottoman Empire.
As he discusses with his therapist, played by Renata Reinsve, his life is falling apart. He's getting a divorce, he drinks too much, and he's carrying around the massive weight of ambient stress. And to make matters worse, while living in the store, he discovers a secret labyrinth of Back Each has a strange and unsettling design.
Tiny doors with three knobs, narrow passageways, piles of strangely familiar laundry, masses of junky furniture stacked ominously. The disorienting effect of back rooms... is magnified through the film's use of found footage, as we view some of the rooms via fuzzy images shot on vintage camcorders. Back Room's origin is what's known as a creepypasta.
For those who don't know, that's a catch-all phrase used to describe pieces of horror folklore that spread on the internet. Kane Parsons made a popular Backrooms web series for YouTube when he was a teenager. This is his debut feature. He's only 20. Backrooms is in theaters now. Rihanna Cruz, I'm going to start with you. What did you think of Backrooms?
I think I like it more the more I think about it, to be honest. There's a bunch of things going for it. You know, it's technically stunning. The production design I find incredible.
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Chapter 3: How does the setting of Backrooms enhance its horror elements?
Yeah. the choices that Cain Parsons is making as a director feel very beyond his years. You know, they feel super seasoned. And I think the best parts of the movie are when it commits to this analog aesthetic and the vintage horror style that you find in the YouTube series. I don't,
necessarily think it functions the best it could outside of youtube to be honest but i think that's intentional right like i don't really find backrooms the movie scary and i don't think it really functions well as a horror movie but as like a conceptual project with weird, disarming elements and lots to say about the nature of memory and the reproduction of thought, I found that fascinating.
And I like generally how it feels in direct opposition to the class of tell-don't-show horror movies that we're in right now, especially YouTuber horror movies, thinking of Obsession, thinking of Shelby Oaks, things like that. It's refreshing to watch something that feels new and exciting and doesn't feel like I'm being spoon fed horror, you know? Sure. And I love that.
This movie is very light on lore and very heavy on just showing you things that will creep you out.
Yeah. And I really, really dig that. And I think like, I love a horror movie that makes you sit and think about why you're uncomfortable. The things that were the least successful for me in back rooms were, you know, the overtly horror elements. I think the unsettling vibe was really compelling to me. And I enjoyed that overall.
Okay. How about you, Jordan?
I really liked this. Like, I like anything. I'll watch anything. I'm a straightforward person, kind of first and foremost. I don't necessarily need to be like, no one told me anything and I had an amazing time. I liked that I was just, like, existing in this place. Like, it worked for me a lot better than I think a movie like this typically would.
As my wife and I discussed on the way out, like, it, like The Cell... Different, but really captured that feeling of being in a nightmare, the illogical nature of it, the endless nature of it, the.
imprisoning nature of that in a world that only can be conjured by your dreams because real tangible life could not accommodate such strangeness it really really does that an excellent use of period piece this being set in the 90s and the it made a surreality of true things about the 90s that made the sense of place feel like a character too like
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Chapter 4: What are the unique design features of the labyrinth in Backrooms?
Or am I going to have to go get a popcorn bucket?
Yeah.
Am I going to have to go get a giant deer Spielberg Disclosure Day popcorn bucket right now?
To hold my back room's vomit. So, you know, that's a me thing. That's not most people. But I did find, like, as I was thinking about it, I'm like, man, I think this would be really, even maybe even more powerful, like, on headphones watching on a laptop.
Yeah, I agree with you, Steven. I'm not sure if this works not on YouTube, to be honest, because that's the creepypasta element of it all. You know, like, part of what makes the back room scary is that you feel like you're, like,
stumbling upon something that is real it's out there you know you're not supposed to see this and when you frame a narrative around it as somebody that watched the original backrooms clips on youtube like when you frame a narrative around the vibe of analog horror i think a lot of the power of the images are lost you know you lose that kind of uncanny valley feeling
Because, you know, it's blown up and there's clearly a budget. And I don't know, it loses a little bit in that regard. And my least favorite parts of the movie were when it feels like a traditional movie, you know, where you have a plot, you have a narrative, you have these characters.
the best parts of the film are when it shies away from this and you get the, and I wish there was more analog horror stuff, but I also say this as somebody that liked the movie Skinnamarink a lot, which exists.
You're a liminal space horror person, a liminal person.
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Chapter 5: What is the significance of the film's origin as a creepypasta?
The queen of Cannes, Renata Reinsbaugh.
I just love Renata Reinsbaugh in everything I see her in. And so anytime she turns up in anything, I'm like, oh boy. So I don't necessarily, I'm not sure I'm capable of thinking she's miscast.
Well, I wonder if, because like what you're saying, if like the message kind of is the medium with this for you, like, I wonder for the big screen, does the concept, like as you experienced it on YouTube, like, do we like literally need these inserted images
moments of grounded reality for that big screen for that 4k experience that is going to be in the theater does the lo-fi analog over the course of like a theatrical runtime do you start losing people is it like i'm in a theater just kind of wandering like do you need that glossy thing for people in theaters to be like yeah i'm watching a movie as opposed to like this is the thing i could be watching on youtube that like sets it apart like does it become a functional thing do we think as opposed to even like like a horror necessity
Yeah, I mean, I think it's mostly functional, but I do think there's even still a juxtaposition between the analog horror sections of the movie where it's very lo-fi, shaky cam, as you mentioned, and the really stark 4K better lit. And I just think whatever's happening outside the back rooms, I didn't really need. I don't need the therapy narrative to couch what is happening, you know?
I don't need the trauma-informed theme. I don't know. And maybe that's my personal taste.
It does spend a fair bit of time kind of hinting at more of a backstory for the Renata Reins of a character than it really pays off. I kind of expected a little bit more ends to get tied together or a little bit more to be explained. It kind of hints that she has a traumatic childhood that may be informing her perception of what's going on.
And I don't know that that fully coheres, but I'm also not sure that full coherence is the point of a film like this.
Right. I don't think it's supposed to tell you how to feel, and I enjoy that.
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Chapter 6: How does the film's production design contribute to its atmosphere?
And as much as that term gets thrown around and we're all used to all these platforms, et cetera, et cetera, we are entering the realm of the ones who are utterly raised within the vacuum of that kind of medium. And I was like, wow, that is wild to me. And it made the movie, I think, feel even more intense when I was watching it. I was like, what if this is what Gen Alpha is just dealing with?
Is this what they're like all the time? Is this what they're thinking? Like that kind of made it scarier for me personally.
I mean, I think that's a really, really, really excellent and important point. And it's something that I've certainly thought about. I've watched a lot of like teen coming of age movies that are supposed to be set in the present day, but are clearly through a Gen X lens. Yeah.
The number of coming-of-age stories that are like kids on bikes in a small town, that's very much my experience growing up. I grew up in a small town. I was a kid on a bike. But the experience of how the internet and how YouTube and how the nature of kind of internet folklore that you can get steeped in. All of these things were completely alien to my childhood.
And to see how that is going to affect art going forward, we talk all the time about how negative it can be and how terrifying things like AI are to any kind of creative enterprise. But this film hints at a way that it could be deployed in in extremely thoughtful and intriguing ways.
Well, Karina, like you were saying, it didn't quite feel right outside of its native environs of YouTube. Yeah. Like that's how true it is to the platform that I'm sure largely helped conceive like that this was even possible. Like that's sort of how of its medium it feels.
As somebody who is younger and whose childhood was fully formed on the Internet, right? Like my sense of what art is and what is scary was motivated by me stumbling on random YouTube videos when I was like 10 years older than being like, holy cow.
oh my god like i i can't i shouldn't be looking at this you know like that's why i i feel like the movie to me could have existed without maybe kowtowing to the old the studio demands the movie is strongest to me when it leans into its origins and what makes it good and what makes it freaky
that's why I see it with these added, you know, narrative structures as less of a horror and more of like a drama with freaky elements. I think it's a really smart movie. You know, like I walked out of there and I was like, did Cain Parsons read like Hito style theory? Like I was like, He's really tapped into what it means to refract an image, refract a memory.
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Chapter 7: What are the critical perspectives on the film's narrative structure?
So directors, filmmakers end up in this limbo where like they need to make the thing and people keep telling them they need to have the thing made, but no one will give the resources to do it. And yes, give 20 year olds the chance to like put this out. And especially in horror where the horror people, they don't need to turn out for Chiwetel Ejiofor. We're not a Ryan. So they will turn out.
Cause you said horror. So the very least you're going to get some people through that door. Hey, And the young filmmakers, these opportunities who've been working in mediums, you probably don't understand enough to translate the totality of their vision onto the big screen and you need to have them make big screen compromises. But let them do it and let's see what happens.
And I'm really glad we got to see what happens with Backrooms.
Absolutely. Love it. All right. That brings us to the end of our show. Rihanna Cruz, Jordan Cruciola, thanks so much for being here. Thanks, Stephen, for having us.
The spring walk up to the horror box office has been so strong. This is all so exciting.
This episode was produced by Liz Metzger and Mike Katzeff and edited by our showrunner, Jessica Reedy. Hello, Come In provides our theme music. Thank you for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. I'm Stephen Thompson, and we will see you all next time.
NPR's newest podcast is where you can find NPR's biggest interviews. I'm Steve Inskeep. The program is called Newsmakers. We talk with some of the most powerful and influential people at this moment to put real questions to them and push for real answers. Follow Newsmakers on the NPR app or any podcast player, or you can watch on NPR's YouTube channel.
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