Backrooms‘ box office success has been positioned as a major win for original horror films. While a massive success and entertaining movie, Backrooms is anything but fully original.
Backrooms is directed by Kane Parsons from a script written by Will Soodik. The cast is led by Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve, and it also stars Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, Lucite Maxwell, and Avan Jogia. The script comes from Will Soodik and Roberto Patino, while James Wan and Michael Clear are producing for Wan’s Atomic Monster.
“A strange doorway appears in the basement of a furniture showroom,” reads the brief and mysterious logline for the movie.
Backrooms’ success is great, but the movie isn’t quite wholly “original”
Backrooms’ success, while not as surprising as that of something like fellow horror hit Obsession, is still absolutely wild. The movie debuted with $81 million domestically and $118 million worldwide in its first weekend. That alone ranks as the largest debut ever for A24, and is considered by most outlets as the largest start in history for an original horror movie.
However, the term “original” here is being used fairly loosely. While Backrooms is certainly an original horror story in that it’s not officially based on an existing franchise, the concept of the Backrooms is not an original one at all. The concept of the Backrooms first appeared around 2019, when the image of a mysterious carpeted room that had been floating around since 2011 was posted to 4chan.
A user replied to that photo with a short story about “noclipping” out of reality, and the concept was born. That thread and photo is largely considered one of the main jumping off points for the concept of the Backrooms, as well as the boost in popularity around the unnerving liminal space aesthetic as a whole. In 2022, Parsons began creating a web series based around the Backrooms, which is what this year’s movie is largely based on.
While the new movie and Parsons’ web series don’t share a ton of lore throughout, it is still an adaptation of his previous work, which was incredibly successful online. The movie itself had also been tracking to do well, specifically because the concept of the Backrooms (and Parsons’ web series) is such a well-known and popular concept. Similar to that of a movie based on a video game, there are some big changes in the final product, but at its heart it does seem to be an adaptation more than an original concept.
Regardless of the distinction, though, Backrooms’ success is major for a number of reasons. Parsons’ himself is only 20-years-old, making him one of the youngest directors to find this level of success so early. It’s also a major boon for both the horror genre and movie theaters, as the success has drawn a large crowds to see the movie.
Originally reported by Dan Girolamo for ComingSoon.
