Thoughts from someone who grew up with the Backrooms

[Null]

As many people know, recently the Backrooms movie came out, and (from what I've heard) it's a genuinely good movie. Recently I was looking into it and I found myself irrationally upset with it, which led me to wonder, why would a movie that people love (and I've never watched) upset me so much? Logically I find it really interesting with amazing concepts and visuals! After some reflection, I think my emotional reaction comes from being a fan of the Backrooms before kane pixels was a big thing. I remember when the "fun wars" were a thing online (the fight between Partygoers and Partypoopers) At the time, I was a preteen going though a rough period, and I feel like the Backrooms (and weirdcore/dreamcore) really got me through those times.

I suppose the Backrooms movie gives me a feeling of uncanny valley (on theme I suppose ) I don't mean this post as any hate to the movie, I just feel like I needed to get out my love for the backrooms wiki somewhere. I suppose another part of this all is how the newer fans don't really know much about the wiki, but that's just the age old idea of "posers" and I'm doing my best to separate the movie and the wiki mentally (like with Marble Hornets and Creepypasta (seriously, so many people who know slendeman don't know about the series that basically created all his lore (not that people should all know about where things come from, I was just connecting ideas)))

Anyway, anyone want to learn more about the wiki? I'd really like to talk about it with someone and spread the knowledge I have :) (please please please don't take this post as me hating on the backrooms movie and its fans, it's perfectly fine to like the movie and not know anything about the wiki, I'm just yapping because it's late  )

[arz]

i think it's a pretty standard reaction towards seeing media that you've loved since its conception being thrown into the eyes of pop culture and be consumed in varying degrees of depth. it's such a familiar feeling that we've given it so much terms: fake fans, posers, performative folks, larpers, etc. we've all been there, either as the newcomer or the wise and all-knowing.

internet culture is becoming pop culture if it hasn't already, the gap is closing for better or worse as modern work culture, private equities, and mega-corporations are desperately forcing unethical consumption and digital tech on us! ...sorry, but just as more niches are becoming not-niches, more niches are forming! you just have to look for it.

last thing, and i'm just speaking for myself here, but there *is* a real sense of novelty and charm in being in-the-know about certain things that are hidden from everyone you know (...it's some form of escapism, i guess).

[lakes]

As someone who liked the Backrooms movie, I can sympathize with the overall feeling that pop culture waters down a lot of concepts and stories. I think a lot of fans of anime and cartoons get a similar feeling with badly done live action remakes. Like it's taking something that's already somewhat popular and making it more consumable to the wider public who might not be into that thing. But it usually happens at the cost of what made that animated property special.

[Asterisk]

I liked the backrooms movie. It was kind of boring, and I don't think it did enough with liminal space, but I liked it.    I think what you're feeling might be the nature of the backrooms being watered down for general audiences. At least that's my guess.    It's so close to the backrooms you rememeber, but not enough because it can't be taken too far otherwise it might alienate audiences.

[Mezzaluna]

I really enjoyed the movie for what it was. The implications are terrifying the more I think about it.

The context that's missing about people being disappointed in the movie is they are thinking about the community-written wiki backrooms, which legally would not be able to be turned into a movie because of the creative commons license it has. It's like people wanting an SCP movie. Legally it would be a mess.

I do like Kane's interapation for what it is. It does peeve me when people say he invented the backrooms (he didn't ). Its just one of many interpretations that got popular. (Also researching a bit more I forgot American Horror Story did a backrooms themed epsiode back in 2024?)

Although that did open the flood gates for other analog horror series to get the Hollywood treatment. Not sure how well it will translate on the screen.

[kringle]

let me tell you as someone who saw the backrooms with a friend who told me it "wasnt a horror movie" and was just "a liminal experience" i was doing backflips of fear in the theater. i think it was a really good directorial debut but a lot of the dialog and slower parts in the beginning felt a bit lacking to me.

i've never been in the trenches of the backrooms fandom like you were but i can deff understand that knee-jerk reaction of being confused/perturbed with the way people are engaging with something you know up down and sideways. i think what your doing in seperating the movie and the version of the backrooms you connect with the most is deff the best way to go about it. 

TBH i think the splintering of interpretations in media is natural, expecially for bigger IP'S/fandom spaces (not to mention how the backrooms specifically really is the peoples media with how it seems like its a cobble of things the internet at large has come up with) its prob my backround in homestuck but i like to think of how diff communities creating different libraries of canons around the same topic is kind of like an online simulation of multiverse theory. like i know on the individual level people tend to think that theres a "right"(their own) interpretation of a piece of media but i personally find it way more fun/less mentally taxing to view it as pockets of interpretation creating Their Own Universe in which their interpretation is valid.

  and then i get to create my own realm of interprtation teehehehehehe

but i do agree w/what everyones saying here about how the movie of the backrooms went less esoteric than it could have. but thats just the ballgame you play with a movie runtime as opposed to a short tv series. things have to be condensed/simplified. i hope the success of the movie will help prop up future ambitious projects instead of bogging it down for the mainstream.

[Kule1Toxic]

I really liked the movie and it gave me a scratch of what I liked about the concept of the backrooms.
I remember being into the wiki and such but later just stopped caring about it, I don't really care for the scp style lore, felt it was too bloated, and just didn't find any horror in it, so I just stuck to the original post, since it was simple, left vague, and up for the imagination.

I remember watching some of Kane Parsons backrooms videos when they were new and thinking it was a breath of fresh air and I really enjoyed his interpretation of it in the movie.

[MrsMoe]

I'm going to be honest rn: Backrooms is my favorite movie of the year so far. I feel weird saying that when people on this thread seem so lukewarm about it, but I honestly loved it, and I feel like the reason for that is that I love liminal spaces and the backrooms for entirely different reasons.

I was an older teen/young adult when liminal spaces took off online, and I remember the horror and #aesthetic vibes surrounding it came from the emptiness and strange lingering feeling of vague familiarity. Liminal spaces aren't creepy to me because there might be a monster around the corner, they're creepy because they look like a place I've been before while being too hazy to be exact. That and these environments should usually be filled with people, and yet they're not. An element of their virality I've always loved analyzing is how popular they've become in an era obsessed with nostalgia and returning to childhood. To me, their occurrence online rn represents a generation desperate to return to the past and the comforting feeling of a world you didn't fully understand yet, but felt deeply safe.

And that's exactly why I love the movie so much. It understands that a fascination with the past and subjective human memory is integral to their appeal. Clark can't move past his failed marriage and various disappointments across his life, so he wants to live in a subjective, highly-biased iteration of the past molded by his own perceptions. Mary's past was isolating and filled with trauma, so the past is very much the last place she wants to be and she wants to escape. I pretty much never indulged in the lore side of the backrooms stuff online, so Kane Parson's take represents exactly what I loved about the concept and the type of meaning I found in it.