The Backrooms (+ Wiki) - Level 80085: The Kiwi Farms

  • Want to keep track of this thread?
    Accounts can bookmark posts, watch threads for updates, and jump back to where you stopped reading.
    Create account
I have also watched the movie and can give my thoughts in regards to both people that have seen the Kane Pixels series and know of the worldbuilding, and the general normie audience.

For those who have no idea of the lore that Kane has spent over 4 years establishing, it's a solid thriller with a resolution that that gives a conclusive "answer" to what the backrooms are. It gives a base to build off of if you only ever knew it through memes or the original context of the image, and satisfies the the most surface level analysis and you can leave your seat thinking, "huh, so that's what it is, but what was all that containment unit stuff? time to write a small novel as to my interpretation."

I'm not going to recap a 3 hour 21 minute Wendigoon vid, so if you care deeply about established lore watch this instead.
How Kane handled the bridge between those in the know and those without prior knowledge is handled very well, almost to the detriment of the casual audience since the movie is RIFE with allegories and motifs. The ocean, the sounds of a ship bracing against the wave, windchimes, the sun in splendour, the ship steering wheels. is all present. Hell, even the name and premise of the main character is in your face, but it'll take a "reputed reviewer" to make the connection as opposed to some train enthusiast who already laid it out years prior.

My only gripe is the approach to Still Life. No, not the soundtrack from the 2nd Kane Pixels channel, that's a iykyk aspect of the film which is ever present but shifted up or down during scenes. I'm talking about the theory of the Complex attempting to create human life from what it gathered.

Be in mind since this is meant for the big screen, there is no mention or allusion to the mold found in the Complex. In fact, it is absent. This is a good take for a casual audience since an endless Complex shouldn't have a singular "big bad." But with the exclusion of the mold factor, the movie heavily relies on the Still Life. And Still Life we do see.

We see it in a bombshell way when Clark investigates the Christmas tree room during a found-footage segment, which was executed in the way of a KanePixels climax. Peak.

This loses its steam as when we focus on the reunion of the main stars. Not to say it wasn't a point of tension and revelation, but for a series to have the aggressor briefly visible or flash on cam to then be background props is underwhelming. But as I reflect it only leads to theory crafting spergs as to why they act and react as they do.

As expected for a 1:50hr runtime A24 movie that leaves off in a "conclusive" way. I say "conclusive" because there's no real conclusion, the backrooms is a concept, not a complete story. But Kane is able to put a bow on it to leave casual audiences satisfied, and lore-knowers making a trillion youtube videos. It's not shallow, but at the same time would have rewatchers feast on details (THRONE ROOM HINT HINT).

It leaves off on Kane's interpretation of the backrooms, and if you're still interested after reading my sperging, it's worth it.
 
DOORSTUCK said:
if you care deeply about established lore watch this instead.
Click to expand...
I started watching some videos after seeing it and they were really getting into the weeds with details. They were presented as if I had to already be in the know about the series so I stopped, but I'll watch that one instead.

I had no expectations with it since I figured it was going to have enough in it for those that know the Backrooms but also be digestible to those that weren't, and that's not an easy thing to do. I also think horror movies usually suck because they're so cookie-cutter with how they're almost all the same with the 'scary' parts (gore, jumpscares, sound effects, found footage etc) so I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed it. The sets they were using kind of blew my mind, it was like a level editor map in a game with unfinished fucked up walls and misplaced assets that came to life in the movie. I got this impression that it was trying to bring attention to people who suffer from schizophrenia. The therapist's mom was a schizo, and because that illness is hereditary it shows her taking her own meds for it in one scene and then she gets thrown into THAT shit? Good lord, what a nightmare! Not sure if Clark was also a schizo or that his combination of alcoholism and indignant bitterness towards everyone just made him lose his mind in a self-inflicted way. The pirate demon thing threw me off and I'm still not sure why that wound up being the monster of the movie. Going off of how the ending was presented, accompanied by x-rays of brain scans, it looked like they were trying to say that the Backrooms is an allegory for getting lost in your own mind. The further you seperate yourself from the world (reality) and plunge deeper into your own made up world (backrooms) then eventually your own delusions (monsters) will kill you before you can escape. Anyone that tries to come get you will probably just wind up getting hurt or killed by you (I felt bad for the employees tbh). And the doctors at the end are less interested in 'fixing' the issue and more interested in finding out 'how it works', because there IS no fixing it. Once you're there, you're there forever, which is what that last shot hit me with before the credits rolled.

At this point I have no idea if this take can be applied to the Internet series or lore of the Backrooms, but that's my outsider's perspective from seeing the movie.
 
I thought I'd take the liberty to splice one of my favorite moments.

 
Path Wanderer said:
His fam must have had money before making the YouTube, right?
Click to expand...
Family making money if by being brought up in a stable household which allowed him to learn blender and create a series on youtube so viral that got recognized by a studio and gave him the opportunity to direct his craft on the big screen?

I don't mean to be antagonistic, but the man shows talent in filmmaking disregarding the movie, and in my opinion he has earned his stripes.
 
Last edited:
It's a good movie. I am only tangentially aware of the Backrooms through some memes I've seen online and this movie does a good job showing off the Backrooms but not lore dumping or explaining too much things which is what caused the death of many internet horror things like SCP.

After watching the movie you never quite get how the Backrooms actually work which is great. The plot being more character focused is actually a good thing.
 
I went into this knowing about the memes but only watching one of Kane Pixels videos. While I enjoyed it, I can't tell how good it is because my screening had packs of kids that would not shut the fuck up. I like that this film is for people with working brains and an attention span. However, whenever things slowed down the iPad kids would get board and talk to echoer or say "shh" back and forth.
Is this normal when going to the moves now? This is the first time I've been the moves in a decade. I remember less noise last time and that was a Disney slop film that probably had teen and kid in the theater as well.
 
The backrooms work as an allegory for nostalgia, and maladaptive coping mechanisms, and obsession, but I think that there's another allegory that aligns with both present concerns and the implicit escalation within the world of story itself.

If obsession, and coping, and being tempted by a simplified parody of the world are what get you stuck in the Backrooms, then what does that make the Backrooms themselves? I think that it is analogous, not to the internet, but to the sorts of communities and social niches formed by the medium of the world wide web; and, via Clark, it is a study of self-coddling web "radicalization" in abstract.

Because really, Clark's a distillation of chronically online zillenial dysfunction: he's overqualified and mired in learned helplessness, his speech and behaviour runs the gamut from Incel/manosphere community member to therapy culture addict, and when he discovers a world where everything is simplified and a reflection of himself, he eventually opts to linger there, first out of desperation, but eventually he embraces it; and, when he does, he is eaten by his own parody.

Clark is every bluesky thought-police tranny, every Incels.is regular, every Facebook boomer ranting at whichever political party is opposite their own: trapped in a labyrinth, "eating" (consuming content of) parodies of other people: to an outsider this is obviously insane, but no, they're home there - and, if that outsider ever got them to really see what they've become, and they still chose to remain within, then they might as well have been consumed by their own hackneyed simulacrum.

This tracks with what Backrooms lore we got, with the Backrooms manifesting sometime in the 80s or 90s, with the number of passages into it growing over time: it loosely tracks with the proliferation of information technology, and the confusion of the Async employee in the denauement reflects the impossibility of anticipating the chaotic effects of introducing an alien communications medium to the world, and the impossibility of modeling it by sole reference to one's own experience thereof.

To end this pretentiousness with retardation, if this interpretation holds water then by the late 2000s in Backrooms world Israel, Russia, and the CIA will have mapped the general contours and use it to manipulate the public
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom