The Backrooms (Found Footage)
Premiere episode of the web series Backrooms
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"The Backrooms (Found Footage)" is the premiere episode of the American science fiction analog horror web series Backrooms, based on the creepypasta of the same name. The episode premiered on YouTube on January 7, 2022. Starring, written, directed, and animated by Kane Parsons (credited as Kane Pixels), it was independently produced by the filmmaker using Blender when he was 16 years old.[1][2]
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| "The Backrooms (Found Footage)" | |
|---|---|
| Backrooms episode | |
| |
| Directed by | Kane Parsons |
| Written by | Kane Parsons |
| Editing by | Kane Parsons |
| Original air date | January 7, 2022[‡ 1] |
| Running time | 9 minutes |
| Guest appearances | |
| |
| External videos | |
|---|---|
 | |
 "The Backrooms (Found Footage)" — Official upload of the episode onto YouTube |
Following the episode going viral as a short film, Parsons elected to expand the film into a full semi-anthological web series.
Plot
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In 1991, while three students are filming a horror short film, the cameraman, who directly films the film, suddenly falls into the Backrooms. After falling down, he calls out for his friends, and on finding no-one around, walks around the yellow-wallpapered connecting rooms around him, oblivious to a gangly humanoid figure observing him from the darkness, briefly caught on his camera.
After climbing a ladder leading to a new room, he follows arrows painted on the wall leading to yellow wall with a black face, a window drawn, and a message saying: "don't move, stay still". The cameraman turns around to find the figure behind him, a non-human figure yelling a warped version of these words, who pursues him through the rooms. To escape, the cameraman jumps down a hole into a lower floor.
On making his way to a blue room with a staircase, the cameraman finds himself in an area with lots of windows and the outside of a lift. After some time, the cameraman eventually enters a door with a fire exit sign which leads him back to another section of yellow rooms. After walking around for a while, a chair is kicked around the corner by another figure, who slowly walks around, the cameraman avoiding it around the corner.
On approaching a "cliff" around that corner, the cameraman turns around to find the figure has walked up behind him, lifting him up in the air and leading him to drop his camera, which falls off the cliff, which leads back to Earth on September 3, 1996, hundreds of feet in the air before landing on the ground of a backyard. While the cameraman's fate is left unknown, the video ends with footsteps approaching the camera as birds chirp.
Reception
The episode was critically acclaimed, with WPST calling it "the scariest video on the Internet".[3] Otaku USA categorized it as analog horror,[4] while Dread Central and Nerdist compared it favorably to the 2019 video game Control.[5][6]
Boing Boing's Rob Beschizza claimed that the episode—like the creepypasta Slender Man and its panned 2018 film adaptation—would eventually be adapted into a "slick but dismal 2-hour Hollywood movie".[7]
See also
- The Oldest View – another web series by Kane Parsons, originally conceived of as another entry in Backrooms.
- Internet culture – Cultural practices shaped by networked communication
- Analog horror – Subgenre of horror fiction
- List of creepypastas
