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Chapter 1: What sparked the interest in the movie 'Backrooms'?
All spring, our colleague Ben Fritz's 14-year-old son has been bugging him to see one particular movie.
My son knows that I sometimes can snag tickets to premieres or early screenings.
Ben covers the entertainment industry, and the movie in question was a horror film called Backrooms.
That's how I first learned this film existed, which he started asking me if I could get him into the earliest possible screening, ideally into the premiere.
Backrooms started as an idea on the internet. And along with millions of other teenagers, Ben's son had closely tracked Backrooms' evolution online.
This wasn't just like, oh, this is a cool movie. This is like, you know, a big screen expansion of this whole mythology that has been really meaningful to him for several years.
Ben actually did get tickets to the premiere. And he was amazed by how much his son had to say about the film.
He was like, oh, well, you have to understand that in this scene, like, what this image represents is X. And it's kind of similar to his videos, but it's different in this way. So was he talking to you the entire time this thing was happening? No, he's, you know, we've raised him in Los Angeles. He knows you have to keep your mouth shut in a movie theater. Okay, good.
But afterward, he could not keep his mouth shut. He couldn't stop talking to me.
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Chapter 2: How did 'Backrooms' evolve from an internet phenomenon?
It's about a furniture store owner who discovers a mysterious portal in his shop's basement that leads to another world.
I found something in the store. Okay.
That world is a series of abandoned rooms and hallways that are hung with yellow wallpaper and flooded with fluorescent light. It looks a lot like reality, but it's off-kilter, uncanny. All these places and buildings, rooms, misremembering themselves.
I saw the movie myself last week, and it doesn't have as much gore or as many jump scares as a lot of horror films do, but there was a pervasive sense of creepiness and being trapped. How did Backrooms come about?
Backrooms started with a single photograph of a fluorescent lit room that was posted on the message board for Chan back in 2019. And people started latching onto it.
That single photo inspired all kinds of content. People posted similar images and had discussions on Reddit, uploaded videos on YouTube and TikTok, and even made Roblox games.
I think I found the backrooms.
There exists a world that you can only reach between 3.30 and 3.33 a.m.
Nah, this can't be real. This can't be real, bro. And it became a meme, and everybody was, they were sort of using it to express this feeling, I think, of ennui and feeling lost in the world and feeling kind of very exposed but not understanding what was happening. And that really, I think, became relevant for Gen Z during the pandemic when everybody was stuck at home.
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Chapter 3: What makes 'Backrooms' significant for Gen Z audiences?
That's it, right? Incredibly cheap. And they took it to the Toronto Film Festival, where it played like gangbusters. You know, it was just a phenomenon.
Obsession is about a 20-something who makes a wish to win over his crush. And magically, he gets exactly what he wants. But it goes horribly wrong.
I love you. I love you.
I love you!
I love you!
That movie came out, and it has been the most amazing box office phenomenon, honestly, I can say, in certainly my professional career, which is that it opened to $17 million, which is very good for a low-budget horror movie, but nothing spectacular. And then every weekend since then, the grosses have gotten better and better.
Typically, a movie would fall like 50% on its second weekend, and it would continue happening every weekend.
Wow.
Usually, like, the opening weekend is its best weekend, is what you're saying?
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