In this movie directed and written by its stars, Gavin Charles and Alex Conn, two filmmakers explore a dead mall yet find themselves trapped within its environment, as the hallways, stairwells and abandoned stores start to trap them.

Made in Kansas City on nearly no budget — $37 or so IMDB would like you to believe — this is a liminal horror movie. That means that it takes place “in a space between two states of being.” This is a big YouTube horror trend and before every Hollywood movie starts to run it into the ground, Charles and Conn are here first.

Hollywood pitch meeting shorthand: Think Skinamarink.

The duo keep yelling, “This is another liminal space!” as they find all these backrooms and the Lunch Zone inside what was once a place of capitalism. Now, it’s a husk. This feels like the next level of found footage and taking streaming video into the horror film.

So wait — for the old people like me — what are The Backrooms?

According to Wikipedia, they “are usually portrayed as an impossibly large extradimensional expanse of empty rooms, accessed by exiting (“no-clipping out of”) reality.” They’re also quite often filled with sinister beings.

In 2019, a 4chan thread posted a “photograph of a large, carpeted room with fluorescent lights and dividing walls.” It upset people and no one could quite figure out why. One anonymous poster was able to sum it up and some of their words came to be the title of this movie: “If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms, where it’s nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you.”

A24 announced that they are working on a film adaptation of the Backrooms based on Kane Parsons’ videos, with Parsons directing. Roberto Patino is set to write the screenplay, while James Wan, Michael Clear from Atomic Monster, Shawn Levy, Dan Cohen, and Dan Levine of 21 Laps are set to produce.

So again, it’s nice that these guys got there first.

Much like the aforementioned Skinamarink, nothing much happens. But that’s sort of the aesthetic, I guess. Again, I’m ancient and I remember when found footage was Cannibal Holocaust and not The Blair Witch. I feel about this the way I do about pop music: I am almost forty years past when that music should be relevant for me. For those who it is for, I hope they love it.

You can watch this and so many of the films at CFF by buying a pass on their website. I’ll be posting reviews and articles over the next few days, as well as updating my Letterboxd list of watches.