When my child was very small, I did my best to use my expertise as a horror film critic to inoculate them from all the scary things out there that I possibly could. Mine is a skillset with what we might gently describe as one with limited utility, but I hoped—however naively—that my knowledge of horror movies might in some way help them contend with a world filled to the brim of real-life nightmare fodder, unleashed upon us daily with increasingly reckless abandon.
Certainly most mothers do this up to a point: That ferociously protective tendency sparked by the act of giving birth is by no means specific to those of us whose professional interests land us firmly in the terrain of the dark side. But my approach was a little more . . . specific.
Like most others of their age born at the very tail end of Gen Z, this kid was born with a tablet in their hand, so developing media literacy and a keen, active critical eye was something I’ve always gone to great lengths to encourage. In practical terms, this resulted in some admittedly unusual parenting highlights, like when we visited the local arts and crafts store, and my three-year-old saw a wooden artists mannequin for the first time—delighting the grumpy post-emo teen working the desk by screaming out at the top of their lungs in joyful recognition: “SLENDER MAN!”
There is, of course, a delicate balance to maintain when horror weirdos raise children. We want them to share our fundamental sense of delight in the genre and the rare, precious skill it grants us to keep our fears contained to a purely fictional space. But at the same time, we don’t want to push them too hard. As any self-identifying horror nerd will tell you, it’s a thin and often volatile line between titillating glee and being actually, genuinely disturbed. Even the most hardened adult horror heads can find that a surprisingly vulnerable, porous border on occasion, so a degree of caution is essential when introducing our young familiars to the genre.
Naturally, this is a dynamic process that changes as kids age. One of the many joys of suddenly finding myself living with a capital-T Teenager is that we can now go to the movies together, which we do often. There has quite organically evolved a kind of ritual surrounding the horror movies we choose to see together. While my personal and professional tastes always lean heavily toward anything horror related, I find with them I am granted a fresh perspective to watch new release genre films that at this point of my career otherwise hold limited appeal. Primarily this takes the shape of teen-oriented, multiplex-friendly new releases—often remakes and sequels—and other suburban, popcorn-friendly hits of the day.
We will see anything together that falls even vaguely into the horror ballpark, and while we can giggle at the odd inevitable stinker, sometimes our individual tastes and interests align so perfectly that it feels like some movies were made especially just for us. Enter Kane Parsons and Backrooms. Admittedly, the phenomenally successful YouTube series had largely fallen off my radar until my kid brought it (and Parson’s lesser known series The Oldest View) to my attention.
Like so many people who watched Backrooms in its short-form online video form, I was floored. I had almost two decades earlier been fascinated with another blockbuster YouTube creepypasta ur-text, the now largely sadly forgotten Marble Hornets (2009-2014). Like Backrooms, it was made on an extremely limited budget by young people working well outside the traditional arena of what is amorphously described as “the screen industries”. But in both cases, it is arguably precisely that outsiderness that granted these skilled young filmmakers and their work such extraordinary freshness and originality.
For teens today, Marble Hornets and Slender Man are as retro a reference as Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers, despite the fact that the former was very much born and bred in the same online ecosystem as Backrooms so many years later. Yet watching Backrooms in the cinema with my kid—the first of a whopping four times they went to see it (who says kids don’t want to go to the movies?)—I was gobsmacked by the echoes of cultural history that rippled so visibly across what was being hyped as the genre’s generational changing of the guard.
In this spirit, our post-Backrooms conversations drifted to things I would never, ever have expected to speak to someone of my kid’s age about. I showed them clips of Robert Weine’s The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920), which sidetracked us briefly to the Tim Pope-directed music video for The Cure’s 1990 banger “Never Enough.” We spoke a lot about Stanley Kubrick, focusing specifically on the uncanny architecture and pulsing liminality that is the beating heart of The Shining (1980), as well as more contemporary films that similarly homage these same kind of spatial bad vibes: Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse (2001), Panos Cosmatos’s Beyond the Black Rainbow (2010), and most recently, Lorcan Finnegan’s Vivarium (2019).
But Parsons has been impressively precise in identifying and discussing influences beyond horror cinema per se, flagging the impact of videogames like Portal (2007) and Portal 2 (2011), television series like Mr Robot (2015-2019) and Satoshi Kon’s Paranoia Agent (2004-2005), Mark Romanek’s brutalising psychological thriller One Hour Photo from 2002 with Robin Williams, and a truly deep cut in the shape of Peter Watkins’s Punishment Park (1971). While not technically a horror movie, Watkins’s movie is without question one of the most disturbing feature films ever made in any genre, whose direct influence on found footage horror (and in turn, Backrooms, which includes elements of that subgenre) is undeniable.
Yet when it comes to these long, spiralling, intriguing conversations with my teen about Backrooms, the real joy has been seeing contemporary horror blossom from even more surprising artistic and cultural ancestors. We spoke at length about Pablo Picasso’s cubist portraits. We spoke at length about Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972). We spoke at length about Jacques Tati’s Playtime (1967), a film which when revisited in this context feels almost like a direct ancestor: as Backrooms’ comic grandfather, in Parson’s hands Tati’s vision is granted a nightmarish twist and runs amok.
But this wasn’t a one-way lesson of an older generation introducing a younger one to earlier work. When Parsons made a passing reference to James Bridges’s The China Syndrome (1979), I was initially flummoxed. But revisiting that film with my kid who had never seen it before, we were both equally agog at how Mark Duplass’s character in Backrooms seems to be directly channelling Jack Lemmon’s Cannes award-winning performance as increasingly disillusioned company man Jack Godell.
With films like Curry Barker’s Obsession, the queer punk horror oeuvre of Alice Maio Mackay, and Parson’s Backrooms sparking a now-seemingly unstoppable discourse about a frankly much-needed generational shift in horror cinema authorship, it’s far too easy to focus on the “new” and forget how concretely—in Parson’s case, at least—these films are connected to art and culture that long preceded them. These films aren’t a disruption, but rather a continuation. Talk of a new wave is certainly seductive and exciting, but we lose something precious—and we do younger audiences and filmmakers a real disservice—when we seek to quarantine this movement from the diverse and often surprising legacies they are reimagining for a whole new generation.
