Backrooms And Bedrooms
I watched The Backrooms and it’s caused some collateral damage, behind the paywall, direct from the shores of Lake Geneva, the return of Ghost Watch!
About a month and a half ago now I watched The Backrooms at the cinema.
You know The Backrooms? Pioneering internet horror by wünderkind Kane Parsons, now a feature-length film by A24, starring Chiwetel Ejiofor? It’s all set in a disquieting liminal space with no windows or exits, and nothing makes sense, and it just goes on forever and ever, and you’re trapped down there, and that’s the point?
The Backrooms? It all looks like this?
Well, if you don’t know The Backrooms, I’ve given you the gist. I missed out the giant shambling pirate monster who is also down there with you, but you get the idea.
I came away from watching The Backrooms thinking ‘yeah, that was ok!’. Sounds like I’m damning it with faint praise, but I genuinely thought it was good, in a non-life-changing way. That’s a fine thing for a film to be. An afternoon well spent! But I didn’t imagine I’d have cause to think about it very often, and while I’d been tense and thrilled as I watched, I wasn’t particularly on edge after watching. No lasting impact there, I thought.
I went home and slept soundly in my own bed.
Two days later I was sleeping in someone else’s bed, having stayed over at my mum’s house (and cruelly relegated her, an increasingly old woman, to her own box room). Her bedroom has black out curtains, and, while I spent a lot of time sleeping in that room aged 1 - 6, it is now, aged 36, an unfamiliar environment - some might say a liminal space. It was once familiar to me, but it’s changed, subtly and disconcertingly, since then, and, as I say, no light is permitted in it, which is quite disorientating. It’s an uncanny bedroom, really.
And so, is it any wonder that I awoke in the middle of the night and finding myself in an incomprehensible space, panicked? It’s actually a bit more involved than that. Half-asleep (perhaps in retrospect much more than half asleep) and realising that I wasn’t in my own room my brain concluded that I was in a window-less, doorless garage that was an entry point to The Backrooms! In one direction the sealed and repetitive hellscape stretched on forever, in the other direction was my only escape route! One of those roller garage doors was slowly descending, sealing me in forever! I, obviously, bolted out of bed and ran to it! Dropped to my knees, and frenziedly tried to forced it up! Up! The shambling pirate monster made of my own guilt and trauma was coming for me! And my life and freedom depended upon wrenching this descending door up, and wriggling out under the gap!
At some point in the midst of the wrenching I came to. And when I say ‘I came to’ I suppose what I actually mean is ‘I woke up’. I had two bloody knees, having dropped to them in panic, and, for all intense and purposes, asleep, my body didn’t in any way brace against, or try to soften the impact, as it would have if I’d dropped to my knees while awake. I also found that the thing I was trying to heave upwards and escape under was the bottom of a harmless, non-descending, non-threatening radiator on the wall of my mother’s bedroom.
I got up off my bleeding knees, and blinked myself back into consciousness, breathed a sigh of relief, opened the black out curtains so I could see the normal and non-threatening space a little, and went back to bed. Everything was ok. No danger here.
As with all good horror films, though, that was a false ending!
A day later my sister text to tell me that, shortly after I left, the radiator had creaked forward and fallen off the wall!
Two things we need to acknowledge here;
The Backrooms may have had more of a psychological impact on me than I initially gave it credit for.
The real horror here is my own hulk-like strength!! What do you mean I ripped a radiator from the wall IN MY SLEEP! I certainly could not have done that while conscious! How genuinely frightening. I’ve actually never sleepwalked in my life before - this is a completely new development! Hope I don’t bust into your houses and start ripping up the fixtures!
That’s it for this week, readers! To access the remaining half of this newsletter you can upgrade to paid - and, in doing so, also gain access a vast archive of comedy writing! Paid subscriptions give me time to write Unsavory News, and will help me pay my mother half of the emergency plumber’s fee. This week only I’m also offering new subscribers the chance to employ me if they need any brute-strength DIY done (included in the cost of subscription - but I can only do it after midnight).
Otherwise, cheerio, see you in fortnight!
