LogFAQs > #968417969

Jesse_Custer posted...

https://youtu.be/H4dGpz6cnHo

(21 points)

Importance: 5
Fear: 7
Personal: 9

From now on these scores will be represented simply by (5/7/9 = 21).

Starting off with a DOOZY.

I've known about the Backrooms since at least 2019. Though ostensibly built around early day Creepypasta bones, there was something all-around appealing, fascinating, creepy, and even oddly comforting about it. In short: it was just plain odd. Where it deviated quite a bit from the thematic confines of that early day creepypasta, was the shared collective memories those who viewed it experienced, seemingly all at once. The realistic nature of the accompanying photo unlocked visions of days spent waiting in doctors' offices, or the distinctive unexplainable smells of shopping mall dressing rooms, or even ones childhood home, as a snapshot forever locked in place in your mind - empty and disturbingly unmoving.

There was a singularly hypnotic energy here which had gripped people, myself included, as the Backrooms slowly became a bonafide phenomenon, grabbing even the attention of those outside its typical purview of 4chan paranormal hounds and YouTube creepypasta enthusiasts. When the pandemic hit, The Backrooms hit even harder - encapsulating the essence of a place no longer bustling with the people who once passed through it. The concept of "Liminal Spaces", essentially locations in a transitory state, such as an empty school hallway or abandoned subway station, inhabited the mindscape in ways even beyond The Backrooms could accomplish on its own, and managed to tap into distinctly primal, genetic memories. It was profoundly disquieting, and I found it very difficult to shake from my mind.

Which is a long-winded way of bringing us to the actual subject of this write-up. In January 2022, a young filmmaker by the name of Kane Pixels graced us with the Backrooms' ultimate masterpiece. A "found footage" terror which places the viewer directly into the heart of the Backrooms in ways it never had before. The atmosphere is unnerving and visceral, as Kane takes us through a quiet, slow-burning tour of this unassumingly hostile place. We don't belong here. The Backrooms don't want us there.

Kane touches on all aspects of the Backrooms experience - the piss-yellow wallpaper, the puke green floors, the winding & endless fixed-camera esque hallways and walls, feeling much like a maze of ones own disparate memories and psyche. He takes us up menacing ladders and explores staircases, peeks inside Silent Hill 2 like holes to nowhere, and languishes in vaguely ominous references to famous liminal spaces, noticing slowly and slowly of the inevitably of his own entrapment and eventual death. All the while, blood-curdling yarls and horrific shrieks from warped, mutated apparitions just out of view eventually bring Kane to that inevitable conclusion.

It's a journey that tests our thoughts and feelings; it references the original intent of the Backrooms perfectly - that recapturing of nostalgic memory, of a lost time, with the knowledge that this isn't how things were meant to be remembered - The Backrooms ultimate goal to me is displaying the utter horrifying consequences of living for your nostalgia, forever stuck in the past. I firmly believe The Backrooms, by Kane Pixels, is a one-of-a-kind piece of truly terrifying cinema. The general creep-factor alone is definitely there, but as with most excellent horror, I find myself unable to separate those nagging thoughts I have with the work, which are the very things that make it so highly impressive and distressing. It's something absolutely worth your time, and if you haven't seen it, I say drop what you're doing and check it out RIGHT NOW!