Loading summary
Transcript57 lines
- [00:00]
Commercial Announcer
This message comes from Angie Tackling a Home Project Angie can connect you with pros who do such a good job you might ask them to be your kid's godfather. Don't do that. Just trust them to get the job done. Find a pro for your projects@angie.com that's a n g I.com.
- [00:23]
Stephen Thompson
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 YouTube series. I'm Stephen Thompson. Today we are talking about back Rooms on Pop Culture Happy Hour from npr.
- [01:14]
Commercial Announcer
This message comes from Angie. If you're tackling a home project, check out angie.com from roofing to remodels and everything in between, Angie connects you with skilled pros who do such a good job you might trust them to do other things like pull out your tooth or be your kid's godfather. Don't actually ask them to do those things, just let them get the job done well, Angie the one you trust to find the ones you trust, Find a pro for your projects@angie.com that's a
- [01:43]
Sponsor Announcer
n g I.com this message comes from Saatva. How you sleep shapes how you live. Restorative sleep can sharpen, focus, stabilize mood and support long term health. Voted Best Luxury Mattress by Sleep Foundation, Saatva's handcrafted luxury mattresses are designed to sleep more deeply and recover more fully at prices below traditional retail. Save up to $625 this Memorial Day at saatva.com NPR this message is from
- [02:14]
Commercial Announcer
AT&T with your summer essential the iPhone 17 Pro. Its center stage front camera auto adjusts the frame to fit everyone into group selfies. Right now at at&t ask how you can get iPhone 17 Pro on them with eligible iPhone. Trade in any condition requires trade in of iPhone 15 or higher excluding iPhone 16e and 17e requires eligible plan terms and restrictions apply subject to change. Visit att.com iPhone for details.
- [02:45]
Stephen Thompson
Joining me today is Jordan Crucciola. She's a writer and Producer and the host of the podcast Feeling Seen on Maximum Fun. Hey, Jordan.
- [02:52]
Rhianna Cruz
Hello.
- [02:52]
Jordan Crucciola
Thank you so much for having me back.
- [02:54]
Stephen Thompson
It is a pleasure. Also with us is freelance music and culture journalist Rhianna Cruz. Hey, Rhianna.
- [03:00]
Rhianna Cruz
Hey Stephen. Happy to be here.
- [03:01]
Stephen Thompson
Great to have you. So, in Backrooms, Chiwetel Ejiofor plays the manager of a pirate themed discount furniture store called Captain Clark's Ottoman Empire. As he discusses with his therapist, played by Renata Rheinzva, 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 rooms. Each has a strange and unsett 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. Backrooms 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 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 gonna start with you. What did you think of Backrooms?
- [04:15]
Rhianna Cruz
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. The choices that Kane Parsons is making as a director feel very beyond his years. You know, they feel super season. 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 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 like YouTuber horror movies. You know, thinking of obsession, thinking of Shelby Oaks, things like that. It's referring to watch something that feels new and exciting and doesn't feel like I'm being spoon fed horror, you know.
- [05:44]
Stephen Thompson
Sure.
- [05:45]
Rhianna Cruz
And I love that this movie is
- [05:46]
Stephen Thompson
very light on lore and very heavy on just showing you things that will creep you out.
- [05:53]
Rhianna Cruz
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 backrooms, you know, the overtly horror elements. I think the unsettling vibe was really compelling to me and I enjoyed that overall.
- [06:17]
Stephen Thompson
Okay. How about you, Jordan?
- [06:18]
Jordan Crucciola
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. My wife and I discussed on the out like it like the cell different but really captured that feeling of. 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 that furniture store can still exist somewhere, but it really existed then, which means you could have ended up in any manner of iterations of it and kind of the. The sterility of place and everything around you and like the quietness of it is such a great contrast with the raw emotional performance that Chiwetel Ejiofor is always going to bring you. He is such a raw, emotional performer and I thought him set against the. All of his surroundings and environments was a really great contrast and also a great comparison to the Scandinavian stoicism of Renata Rhajnzeva. Well chosen select cast as they went further and further into this place. And we've heard about how they really practically designed this gargantuan location that people were actually kind of getting lost in on set.
- [08:01]
Stephen Thompson
Oh gosh, I can only imagine.
- [08:03]
Jordan Crucciola
I'm so happy they dove into the whole world. They built it, they let this kid see it through as a feature. And it just feels unlikely in so many ways. And I'm super excited that it exists. Would Highly recommend.
- [08:15]
Stephen Thompson
Yeah, I mean, I agree with most of what both of you are saying. I definitely want to shout out superior production design. This is a really, really well built set that gives you just this sense of kind of Kafkaesque horror, but also it's tapping into several different deeply unsettling things about society. Which is what the best horror stuff does, right? Like you're taking something mundane and making it terrifying. And what is more mundane than these beige fluorescent lit that, like, piped in cheer the voice that is, like, welcoming you in a bunch of different languages? It's supposed to be pulling you in, but it's absolutely pushing you away. Like, those effects, I think, were so smartly leveraged here. And I'm surprised we have gone this far into this film when we're talking about what this film is commenting on without mentioning AI because this film, I mean, it's set in the early 90s. Not only is it pre AI, it is pre Internet. It's pre cell phones.
- [09:22]
Rhianna Cruz
Interesting. Yeah.
- [09:23]
Stephen Thompson
Rhianna, you referred to the kind of dream logic that is going on in a lot of these rooms, but there is also this uncanny valley of AI imagery and how creepy and unsettling it when you see a figure that is supposed to look like a human, but it has too many fingers.
- [09:41]
Jordan Crucciola
The denizens of the backrooms are definitely like early, ginned up AI creations. Is that nine fingers?
- [09:49]
Stephen Thompson
Absolutely. And it's done in a surprisingly subtle way. It's not underlining that for you in any way, shape or form. But you are sitting there like, why am I having the same creeped out, unnerved feeling that I get when I look at bad AI?
- [10:04]
Rhianna Cruz
Totally.
- [10:05]
Stephen Thompson
And I think it's really using that in such strong ways. No matter how much it's intending to be commenting on it, it is, to me, unmistakable. I will say I yearned for a smaller screen. First of all, it is very interior. And I think the smaller a screen you watch it on it, the more interior it will feel and the more unsettling it will feel.
- [10:26]
Rhianna Cruz
Yeah, I agree with you, Steven.
- [10:27]
Stephen Thompson
I am also a person who gets motion sickness from shaky. I almost had to walk out of Blair Witch Project all the many years ago when I saw it in theaters like everybody else. Not because it was too scary, but because I wanted to vomit.
- [10:43]
Jordan Crucciola
Yeah, that was the hidden headline when people were like, people are walking out of Blair Witch Project and throwing up. It's like, it's because they're sick, right? It wasn't. Cause they were so scared. They were scared. But it was because they were motion sick.
- [10:53]
Stephen Thompson
Right. And this film does. If you are somebody who is very sensitive to that, it's worth being warned that it has a bunch of shaky cam stuff. It opens with enough shaky cam stuff where I was fully sitting there thinking, can I gut this entire movie out or am I going to have to go get a popcorn bucket?
- [11:11]
Jordan Crucciola
Am I going to have to go get a giant Dear Spielberg Disclosure Day popcorn bucket right now?
- [11:17]
Stephen Thompson
Am I to hold my backroom'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.
- [11:36]
Rhianna Cruz
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 backroom 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.
- [12:47]
Jordan Crucciola
You're a liminal space horror person. A liminal person.
- [12:51]
Rhianna Cruz
I really like that movie. And I do think there's similarities between, like, the quiet analog liminality of that film and backrooms. And I just wish it leaned into that a little bit more. Everything with Renata, the therapist character, I was kind of tapped out for. I did not like her casting. Interesting. I thought it was out of place. Yeah. And I think maybe it was just I was wanting more of that sit back, let it wash over you feeling. And I think her character serves a lot to explain how we should be feeling. And I didn't enjoy that as much
- [13:33]
Stephen Thompson
as I could have I think occasionally taking the film out of those backrooms and into the real world helped situate how unsettling those worlds were. I certainly appreciated having a little bit of solid ground to stand on every once in a while. I also just. I'm a Renata Reinzva, Stan.
- [13:54]
Jordan Crucciola
The queen of Cannes. Renata Reinzva.
- [13:57]
Stephen Thompson
I just love Renata Reinzeva in everything I see her in. And so anytime she turns in anything, I'm like, oh, boy. So I don't necessarily. I'm not sure I'm capable of thinking she's miscast.
- [14:07]
Jordan Crucciola
Well, I wonder if. Because, like, what you're saying, if, like, the message kind of is the medium with this for you, like, does it. I wonder, like, for the big screen, does the concept, like, as. As you experience it on YouTube, like, do we, like, literally need these inserted 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? Or like, 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 a 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?
- [14:51]
Rhianna Cruz
Yeah, I. 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, like, really stark 4K better lit.
- [15:09]
Jordan Crucciola
Sure.
- [15:10]
Rhianna Cruz
And I just think whatever's happening outside the back rooms, I didn't really need. I don't need, like, 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.
- [15:25]
Stephen Thompson
It does spend a fair bit of time kind of hinting at more of a backstory for the Renata Rheinzva 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.
- [15:54]
Rhianna Cruz
Right. I don't think it's supposed to like, tell you how to feel. And I enjoy that.
- [16:00]
Jordan Crucciola
I was really. I was reading Amy Nicholson's review of this for LA Times, and she got it. She made a point that I thought was just so interesting, which is, kid is so young. Like, and I say kid, it sounds pejorative. I'm 40. They're all children, these kids today, with
- [16:13]
Stephen Thompson
that creepy pasta, the creepypastas.
- [16:16]
Jordan Crucciola
Like, I'm not the oldest person in the world, but, God, 20 seems so young when you're twice that age. But Amy pointed out that Kane Parsons is the same age as YouTube. First videos, like, his whole life, like, beginning to current. He is fully pickled, he is brined in this maelstrom of digital material and processing and interface. And to your point, Steven, with the mention of AI, that inevitably comes, like, part of the brine that we're all stewing in. For someone like Kane Parsons, he's never been in another soup. He's. This is what he's been in the whole time. So, like, it was fascinating to watch it and think about, like, man, the things your imagination is molded in and the. The caverns that it goes to has been exclusively defined by this thing where I had, like, an adolescence under my feet before it started becoming something I really interfaced with. You know, creative people are everywhere. But, like, for me personally, it was like, I do think there is a way that this person's mind and his contemporaries, his cohort, will be wired that actually my brain doesn't make this. This particular kind of creativity. It's like. It's like having a brain that could be a creepypasta generator, as opposed to, like, figuring out how. What a creepypasta is along the way and getting into it. Yeah, to watch this and the way that some of those images are really. They are really resonant in comparing, like, how, like, AI images looked, especially when we were starting to get those really generated videos. I was like, wow, this is like, I'm. We are watching a creative mind of purely digital conception. I don't know what the guy's universal media diet is like, but, like, he clearly, like, platformed himself on YouTube, started making stuff there was like, dang. Like, that feels like a true. Like, we have hit a true generational divide between the creators that create came before and the ones that came after, where it can now be pure digital native. 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.
- [18:36]
Stephen Thompson
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 teen coming of age movies that are supposed to be set in the present day, clearly through a Gen X lens. 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 extremely thoughtful and intriguing ways.
- [19:38]
Jordan Crucciola
Well, Greeno, like you were saying, it didn't quite feel right outside of its native environs of YouTube. That's how true it is to the platform that I'm sure largely helped conceive that this was even possible. That that's sort of how of its
- [19:51]
Rhianna Cruz
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 old and being like, holy, oh my God, like, I can't. I shouldn't be looking at this. You know, like, that's why 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. I think it's a really smart movie, you know, Like, I walked out of there and I was like, dude, did Kane Parsons read, like, Hito Style Theory? I was like, he's really tapped into what it means to refract an image, refract a memory. What does it mean when something is broken down to its bare bone parts and then built back together? And I thought that was really, really intelligent. And I just wish that maybe he trusted the audience just a sliver more to get there without adding what I felt was like an unnecessary kind of umbrella structure.
- [21:16]
Jordan Crucciola
Like, yes to this. Yes to a new talent that hasn't proven themselves conventionally necessary. Because even Curry Barker has been making like longer form things that are more akin to conventional television or movie experience. As a creator on YouTube up to this point. And Kane Parsons is so young, this is mostly the thing that he has done and there's not really evidence to be, be like, he can shoulder the budget and the resources and all this. And there's. I've been getting so hung up lately seeing these younger creators get the chance of these walls that seem arbitrary, placed up before directors where you have to like, put your 10 years in. 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 Chiwetelajiva, Wernada, Rheinza. They will turn out because you said horror. So at the very least, you're gonna get some people through that door. Hand 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.
- [22:24]
Stephen Thompson
Absolutely love it. All right, that brings us to the the end of our show. Rihanna, Cruz, Jordan Crucciola, thanks so much for being here.
- [22:32]
Rhianna Cruz
Thanks, Stephen, for having us.
- [22:34]
Jordan Crucciola
The spring walk up to the horror box office has been so strong. This is all so exciting.
- [22:40]
Stephen Thompson
This episode was produced by Liz Metzger and Mike Katsif 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. See you all next time.
- [22:58]
Sponsor Announcer
This message comes from ixl. Spring is here and school testing is just around the corner. IXL can help make an impact on your child's learning. Receive 20% off an IXL membership if you sign up today@ixl.com NPR this message comes from Integrative Therapeutics, makers of Cortisol Manager named Best overall Ashwagandha supplement by Vogue use code STRESS2026 for 20% off of Cortisol Manager on Amazon dot com.