BACKROOMS REVIEW - From Creepypasta to Creepyyoutube to Creepymovie

Added: 2026-06-03

[00:00:06]Greetings and salutations, guys. I'm here with my review of Back Rooms. This is a new horror movie being released by A24 that is getting a lot of buzz before its release. And there's a lot of reasons why I think. One is the fan base that is already there for this concept and the shorts that inspired this movie.

[00:00:23]Also, the making of this movie is interesting because the director and writer Kane Parsons is 12 years old. No, he's 20 years old. But point is, dude can't drink legally. And he is making a feature film debut that is in wide release from A24, which is all super impressive. He's got several bigname producers involved. Ozgood Perkins, Shaun Levy, James Juan. Uh and the fact that for a feature debut from a very young filmmaker, he has two bonafide acclaimed actors. Both Academy Award nominated actors, Chuel Edgio and Ranata Rinbay. Both has acclaimed has their names are hard to pronounce if you're a silly American like me. The plot involves Edgio's character Clark running a furniture store where he finds something very strange going on in the basement where there is a wall that he can walk right through. And on the other side of that wall are the back rooms are this sort of neverending series of other rooms that at first appear to be very bare and basically just an empty department store but as he goes further in there is stranger and stranger things up ahead. Not the TV show Stranger Things just actually Stranger Things. Uh and he's going to encounter a lot on the other side there. Ryan's Fabe plays Mary, who is his psychiatrist, who he is going to to talk to about what's going on, hoping she'll believe him. I don't think it's giving anything away since it's in all the marketing trailers, posters, what have you, that eventually Mary is going to find her way into the back rooms as well, and have to figure out what the hell is going on here. I was really impressed with back rooms, which I think has a really unsettling, creepy vibe to it, and has such a great core visual. this image of these neverending rooms and the benality of it mixed with the oddness of the things that we're going to start to see. It really works. And to go through these spaces and to have things get more and more unsettling, strange, to have things start popping up. The trippiness of it all is great. And the fact that there are doors and ceilings and strange ramps to nowhere and Mcshers type staircases and it all just seems so bizarre. the layout of this place and there is just a great atmosphere to this movie. I had no familiarity with anything Kane Parsons had done before I watched this. I just knew the reputation. I knew the the basic backstory of him coming from YouTube being super young and doing this movie. But I think he definitely shows that he has a great eye and that he has a really great sense of tension and of tone and of pulling you into this, you know, and and letting it be slow paced in a way that is properly creepy. Movie doesn't feel slow, but it definitely kind of builds builds that tension in a way that I think is very very effective.

[00:03:14]He gets plenty of assistance here, of course, from these two amazing actors. I mean, look, this is a very small cast, but when you have, you know, people that are this great, you don't need a lot of actors and uh the movie has interesting sort of perspective shifts between who we're really following. But both these actors, I think, bring so much. Edio plays Clark as a guy who really feels like he's kind of been ripped off by life. His marriage has fallen apart.

[00:03:39]He's doing a job he doesn't want to be doing. Uh he doesn't feel like he's achieved his dreams. And then he gets very obsessed with what he finds on the other side of this wall and with trying to chart it, trying to figure out more about what's happening in there. And he does such a great job of showing that obsession and you absolutely believe it, but you know, behind his eyes that this is something that's really kind of taken hold of him. Mary, meanwhile, is the more interior character and I think Ryan Fay does a great job of playing that.

[00:04:08]And someone who we know has her own trauma in her background. We get some flashbacks and some glimpses of a very difficult childhood. And I think she does a really good job of playing this woman who is really sort of focused in on her job. She's definitely accomplished in a way he's not as far as her career, but she's got burbling in the background. This stuff maybe she's never really dealt with and that this circumstance is going to kind of make her forced to have to think about in a way that she probably doesn't want to.

[00:04:36]The movie has a couple trouble spots for me. One is a strange moment when Clark shows up to talk to Mary and it absolutely feels like we've skipped something to the point that I felt like did they cut something here? Because the last time we see him and what he's thinking about what he just experienced in the back rooms versus when he comes to her, he tells her about things we didn't see. That makes me suspect that they trimmed this movie down. Maybe they thought it was too long. Maybe thought it started to drag. But I wish they could have conveyed that information in a different way visually because when he starts to say something that he's gone through that we didn't see, I felt like, wait, did we did we miss something? Did we skip something? So, I did feel like we kind of jumped a bit where we shouldn't have. And then I didn't love everything about how it ended. I should say the movie is absolutely giving us an ambiguous ending by design and there is nothing wrong with that. And I think a lot of horror movies in particular can have a lot of fun with ambiguous endings. And I really thought the final shot of the movie is highly effective, but the way that it parcels out some of information and holds back some uh I I wanted a little more than we got as far as some of the characters and some of the questions it leaves that, you know, I don't know if we'll ever get an answer for. Now, there is absolutely a great chance we're going to get some sort of sequel to this. I know I'm saying this before the movie's even come out, but the movie looks like it's going to open really well and it's obviously doesn't need to make that much money to be profitable. So, there's a good chance we get some sort of follow-up to this universe, but there's some things and some dangling threads here. I thought I would have liked a little more of even on an emotional level than we quite get.

[00:06:16]Uh, but I don't know. Overall, I felt very satisfied with this movie because the journey it took me on and walking through the back rooms. The the title itself, I thought just worked so well.

[00:06:29]And I really was digging that vibe and digging just the feel of it all. There are a couple big sequences. Ones are the very beginning, but there's one in the middle, a very crucial one where we switch to found footage. And I do know that on the YouTube shorts, there was at least some of them were found footage, maybe all of them. And I thought that was really well done. I thought the way that it incorporated that without the movie being a found footage movie, but having these two key sequences where it switched to that and took advantage of the fact that it's set in 1990, so the video quality can be lower quality and inherently more creepy. I really enjoyed that and I thought that he did a really good job, King Parsons, of using that, you know, the found footage idea, which itself can be very polarizing, but the fact that we got to go back and forth here, I thought was a great way to kind of play in both realms cinematically.

[00:07:19]And it also works for the movie itself, which is playing literally in multiple realms. I saw this movie at a screening where Kane Parsons did a Q&A afterwards, moderated by Sam Esmail, the creator of Mr. Robot, who is clearly a huge fan of this movie. And it was interesting to kind of learn a bunch about the backstory. I didn't know because again all I knew was young dude made a short that they are now adapting into a feature film. I didn't know that there was multiple sort of episodes of the back rooms. I don't know if web series would be the right term, but there had been a lot of back rooms that he'd made.

[00:07:51]But also the creepy pasta, all the stuff that came before it, the fact there's a whole online community about the concept of back rooms that goes way beyond what even Kane Parsons is doing. Uh, that was all new to me. I did a little bit of, you know, research online afterwards. I didn't read it all. I didn't even watch any of the shorts yet. I probably will afterwards, but I do think it's important that the movie should exist on its own. It's important that I can watch this movie or anyone can watch this movie without any of that backstory, without seeing any of that. And can it work? And I do think it does. You know, uh, the fact that there is so much more, that's cool. and the fact that this is sort of a larger universe that he is thinking about in those terms. He's already created a bunch of it. It sounds like there's definitely the possibility for more. And I think I will not be shocked if they announce that there's more. So, I think that's great. I think that it's really cool when you can finish a film like this and find out it's part of the larger world, but not feel like it there was a barrier to entry. I never felt watching the movie like, well, trying to catch up. I don't know any of this stuff they're trying to tell me. I thought it was presenting it in a way that was very accessible, even if I thought at the end they were holding back a little more little more than I would have liked. As I mentioned, it's a very small cast, but there's some nice supporting performances here as well. One by Mark Duplass playing a guy who uh well, he's a little mysterious, this figure. I won't talk about him too much, but I like the way that he works within the story. And then you have Lita Maxwell as Clark's employee and Finn Bennett as her boyfriend, who are kind of periphery characters until they're not, until they get to take center stage. And I think they're both great.

[00:09:22]Uh playing, you know, two young people who don't exactly understand what they are walking into. How could they? And I believe completely the reactions that they have to this insane situation. So yeah, I'd say this is another impressive debut for a young YouTuber who's walking into horror as his feature film debut. I can't say that I've loved every single one of the movies that these guys have made, but a lot of them I have. I think a lot of them show a lot of creativity and you can really see how they've honed a lot of skills online just as far as their camera work and a strong point of view. And I think the back rooms, yeah, it feels really self- assured. And yes, as much as it's easy to joke about this guy being so young, I think Kane Parsons is super impressive. Listening to him talk, I thought he was impressive. He clearly has given this a lot of thought.

[00:10:11]He's clearly a very thoughtful guy. Uh, and I think he's made a very impressive first film and I look forward to I saw his birthdays in June, so can't wait for him to have his his first drink ever, you know, legally at least. So, those are my thoughts on Back Rooms, which is going to be in theaters everywhere this weekend. And if tracking is correct, could be making a lot of money this weekend. If you can like and subscribe, that'd be great. Thanks a lot, guys.