One of the least frightening “horror” movies I’ve ever seen. If I had a teenager who thought this was frightening, I’d sit them down for The Shining and tell them the Overlook Hotel is the original backroom (which it was, if we’re being honest).
I really do like the concept, but the execution is a big miss for me. There are so many interesting things you could do with this idea, and Backrooms pursues zero of that potential. The therapist setup is something I would have written in high school, so I wasn’t surprised the director was 19. (I would have made her the wife. It would have been way creepier.) It just feels like something you’d make as a student film, if you had a budget for sets.
Maybe one day we’ll talk about how Kane Parsons was a visionary and his first film was “surprisingly good” considering his age. But without the benefit of that hindsight, and with no assumption of foresight, this is very okay for a first movie and very meh for a movie.