Tag: horror film

Film by Ezekiel Yu
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A still from Kane Parsons's "Backrooms," depicting Chiwetel Ejiofor in a brightly lit yellow room, as reviewed and analyzed by poet and film critic Ezekiel Yu for the automachination literary magazine.

I Think I Like It In Here: Reviewing Kane Parsons’s “Backrooms” (2026)

Kane Parsons’s “Backrooms” is the first mainstream film that I’m aware of to have been inspired by, of all things, a 4chan post. Chances are you already know about the Backrooms, especially if you’re Gen Z or a millennial or have spent any significant amount of time memeing on the Internet. If you don’t, then it’s a simple enough concept to explain. Imagine a dank, yellow-wallpapered office space, empty of all features save the blank angularity of walls and a vaguely unsettling openness. Now imagine that going on and on, forever.

It’s a weird alternate take on our reality, as if the universal software had glitched and copy-pasted this uncanny liminal space into its own pocket dimension. An anon on the original 4chan post (which featured on one of the site’s forums dedicated to paranormal phenomena), however, explains it more evocatively:

“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”

—Anonymous, 4chan (May 13, 2019) […]

Film by Jessica Schneider
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A stylized shot of Candace Hilligoss anxiously driving a car in Herk Harvey's "Carnival of Souls".

Company of Others: On Herk Harvey’s “Carnival of Souls” (1962)

Imagine a film where the only time we witness a woman alive is in the first few moments when, following a drag race, the car she is in careens off a bridge and into a river. Following, all are dead, save what appears to be her, who pulls herself out from muck and swamp like a zombie, walking slowly and claiming to not remember anything. Then flashes the title and the eerie, ambient organ music that accompanies. It’s not that the scene is scary insomuch as otherworldly. So who is she exactly?

Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls stars Mary Henry (Candace Hilligoss) as an attractive young woman who seems to move about in a dream, where she remains detached, and reviles human contact. After the accident, she informs her employers about her new job as a church organist in Utah (she studied organ in college). Astute and cerebral, Mary appears as though something else is continually on her mind. When she’s pleasantly asked to ‘come back and visit,’ she replies coldly, ‘thank you, but I am never coming back.’ Throughout, this emotional detachment is paramount to assessing Mary’s character. ‘I have no use for the company of others,’ she says. At one moment, she seems head strong and alien, as though she does not belong with the human race, but then, when inundated with fear due to the presence of a strange man who continues to follow her (played by director Herk Harvey), she is emotional, feeble, needy. She does not want to be alone. […]