Credits roll. The final image sticks. You leave the cinema, dazed.

Somehow, the corridors look different. What once was mundane and sterile is haunting; every turn in the cinema hallways seems filled with a macabre candour that is subtly suggesting something strange.

In just under two hours, the film’s imagery has infected the real world. Architecture itself is bent. Every empty space down an alley is not eerie because of its vacancy; for now, a film has succeeded in filling in that part of our imagination. 

Backrooms hit cinemas in May to an astounding box office success.

Audiences across generations scrambled to the cinema, desperate to get a glimpse into a haunting, misremembered world. Kane Parsons (famously twenty years old) had managed to adapt an internet-driven creepypasta, originating from a single image and text caption, into a full-length mainstream A24 feature film. Quite the achievement was the general cultural consensus.

There was a buzz around the film that, in retrospect, was perhaps external to the substance of the filmmaking itself. Something about the context – the tale of internet-filmmaking prodigy, the mythic rep that the backrooms had already built, played into the film’s reception greatly. 

Like me, I’m sure many left the cinema with high hopes for the future of modern horror, but little expectation that the bar would be raised again anytime soon after Backrooms.

Then came Obsession. 

Curry Barker’s nightmarish film, exploring the destruction of autonomy and modern relationships through a grotesque lens, landed with vigour upon release. From its pacing to its use of eerie lighting, the film’s attention to detail was praised highly, with many comparing it to the great works of modern horror such as Ari Aster’s Hereditary. 

To me, Obsession completely knocked Backrooms out of the water and exposed a lot of the major weaknesses within it.

Mainly, Backrooms exists as a world that doesn’t want to be inhabited by a narrative. It sits in a place where conventional storytelling erases some of the appeal of eeriness. Therefore, inherently the film undercuts its own strength by succumbing to a plotline that is far too predictable at times. Some of the subtext in the film is hammered home to no end, too. 

Why then, is Backrooms still a modern classic?

Let’s go back to 1973 and take a look at The Exorcist. A modern viewing of this film will diverge quite brutally from the audience of the time. Nowadays, its scare factor has largely dissipated and been replaced by cynicism. Many audiences would find the vomit and cursing in this film to be so ridiculous that it translates as comedy. 

So then, why is it still maintained as a classic horror film?

The horror of The Exorcist came out of the context of the film’s release, not the substance of the story and the filmmaking exclusively.

The Exorcist was released into a highly Christian America, and a much more theistic world than the one we live in now. In America, it had only been three years since the Manson family murders, which had shaken the peaceful Hollywood community and caused fear to sweep across society. 

The Exorcist’s use of language and depiction of Satan directly responded to the state of culture at the time, leading to an explosive conflict within the film’s audience. This resulted in the shock-fuelled reaction to the film and gave it the status of being a classic that it holds today.

Here we start to see that perhaps the labelling of a film as “classic” is not inherently about the quality of the film. Instead, it’s about what the film reflects about the state of culture at the time of its release. 

This leads us to Backrooms, which I would argue has earned the title of modern classic because it directly reflects a shift within storytelling and filmmaking. This shift is towards narratives and artistic references that are sourced from the internet.

Backrooms represents the internet as a subculture finally reaching into the modern horror mainstream.

Moreover, Backrooms’ use of setting as an antagonistic character (circa The Overlook Hotel in The Shining) is particularly effective culturally as it aestheticises liminal spaces with an eeriness. Not only was this already a popular idea across social media, but it infects reality, causing the film’s identity to map itself onto a modern audience’s perception of the liminal spaces around them. This influence on the real world and how a film lives in culture’s consciousness is another clear signifier of a classic.

And so, though the film is flawed in many ways, it remains a modern classic due to its interaction with contemporary culture and the space it inhabits within the zeitgeist.

Image credit: Ben Heiss