When I was a child, the nightmares that terrified me the most seldom involved ghosts, killers, demons, or any other entity desperate for screentime during my dream time. It almost always involved just a place.This was always a familiar place, yet somehow uncanny. It often felt oddly serene, but had a malice of some sort that seemed woven into the space itself. There was something off about it that triggered a fear so primal that I’d often wake up in a cold sweat. Sometimes that dread would take shape as some vague, menacing thing pursuing me with unspecified intent and relentless determination. Most of the time though, the place itself was enough. But to know it, you must first have dreamt it.So you can imagine my mounting horror when Kane Parsons’ feature-film adaptation of the internet age’s most infamous liminal space rendered that feeling with such astonishing fidelity. Even if the mere idea that an entire generation raised on internet lore might have somehow excavated the same corner of the collective subconscious is just as provocative to ponder, this was an archaeological reconstruction of a childhood anxiety so specific that it feels insane to witness materialise outside my subconcious. Backrooms (English)Director: Kane ParsonsCast: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, and Lukita MaxwellRuntime: 110 minutesStoryline: A furniture store owner discovers a dimension of seemingly endless liminal spaces accessed through the basement of the storeThe case of Kane Parsons is a curious one. He belongs to the first generation of filmmakers whose artistic education involved internet culture, videogame lore, analogue horror, and the endless well of knowledge at the end of a satisfying YouTube rabbit-hole. Yet his imagination keeps circling ideas that predate the internet by decades, pointing towards more fundamental concerns involving space, memory or dreams, which enchanted and inspired cult genre voices like David Lynch, Andrei Tarkovsky and Stanley Kubrick.The 20-year-old filmmaker behind the eponymous viral YouTube series built his reputation creating found-footage horror shorts through Blender and Adobe After Effects while still in high school. Those videos transformed a creepypasta inspired by a 2019 4chan image of an empty yellow room into one of the most defining horror mythologies of the internet. His feature adaptation for A24 follows Clark, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, a failed architect who now manages Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire, a struggling furniture showroom in California, in 1990. While investigating strange electrical faults in the store’s basement, he discovers a porous wall that leads into an endless uncanny-valley labyrinth of liminal rooms.