Backrooms

A24

A24 is looking to nab a huge hit in the form of Backrooms, projected to make something between $40-50 million during its opening weekend. The horror movie, based on a boundary-pushing YouTube series, was directed by 19-year-old Kane Parsons, the creator of the original Backrooms, an age almost unprecedented for helming a project like this.

Now, reviews are coming for Backrooms, and while decent enough, they are not sky-high like a few other horror entries this year, including the runaway hit from just two weeks ago, Obsession, which is on its way to make 100x its budget amidst 95% and 94% critic and audience Rotten Tomatoes scores. Backrooms, in contrast, has a 78% Rotten Tomatoes score right now with three dozen reviews in. How does that stack up against the other horror offerings of the year? Here’s the list of major releases:

• Obsession – 95% critic score
• Send Help – 93% critic score
• 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple – 92% critic score
• Hokum – 88% critic score
• We Bury the Dead – 88% critic score
• Backrooms – 78% critic score
• Primate – 78% critic score
• Undertone – 74% critic score
• Forbidden Fruits – 74% critic score
• Ready or Not 2: Here I Come – 73% critic score
• The Mummy – 47% critic score
• Passenger – 46% critic score
• The Dreadful – 36% critic score
• Scream 7 – 30% critic score
• The Strangers Chapter 3 – 18% critic score

So, good, not great, and well outside the top five entries there. The film is wild in concept and was always going to be a risk. Here’s the synopsis, which sort of only scratches the surface of what this world is:

“A strange doorway appears in the basement of a furniture showroom.”

Yeah, that’s all you get. But going a little deeper, the YouTube series follows people going through these passageways and ending up in an endless series of mostly empty rooms, a maze that goes on forever, and they are often stalked by unknown monstrous creatures. It turned into an elaborate world with loads of lore, and the original video has 78 million views. All the other videos added together take that well over 100 million. So, you have part of the reason this may be about to make a lot of money.

I would not expect Backrooms to have the sort of insane trajectory that Obsession has had, but there’s really no point comparing it, or any other horror movie, to that phenomenon, which is breaking 25-year-old records with things like a 39% increase in box office between weekends. But Backrooms, also with a quite low budget, appears like it’s going to be a big success in its own right, and that’s all that really matters.

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