There should already be hundreds of scary movies set in backrooms. The 4chan meme is only a few years old, but the concept of a vast sunless lair of fluorescent light, mildewy carpeting, and pasty drywall has been loathed for longer than I’ve been alive. Something like every third ’90s movie was built on the idea that spending time in this sort of place is a fate worse than death, so it’s strange nobody until now thought to add monsters.
Kane Parsons’s debut feature, adapted from his recent series of meme-inspired YouTube videos but set in 1990, literalizes the tacit horror of Office Space and American Beauty (both released at the end of that decade) and adds nostalgia. This last ingredient may surprise fans of the earlier versions, though it makes a certain historical sense. Malls, big-box stores, and white-collar workplaces don’t have fans, exactly, but now that Amazon is exterminating all three, the middle-class life they represented can nearly pass for utopian. Hence, Backrooms, the premise of which isn’t just, “What if there were a vast sunless lair of fluores…