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'Backrooms' is Best Enjoyed As a Brutal Skewering of Millennial Cringe
(vincemancini.substack.com)
this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2026
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Slop.
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Bewildering to see this become the go-to comment to lob at a movie that beats the audience over the head so much. I encourage you to rewatch it & notice how completely checked-out everyone in the suburbs is to the point where they don't notice a witch trap house, the homeless guy, how the situation is minimized by the (pleasant & well-meaning) principal, etc
When the director says he put a floating gun dream sequence 'just because' it's easy to assume the rest of it is the same, especially when the nature/mystery of the witch trap house is presented as the focus over anything you've described. It's been awhile since I've since it so I don't remember the side characters much. I'm imagining if Zone Of Interest presented the holocaust camp as its own mystery box while trying to say it's about suburban disinterest.
Also, try to make an argument without being a smuglord on here, please.
Big fan of lying like this (not saying the quote is inaccurate)
Funny contrast to something like Saw pretending it has a message. Or idk pretending VVitch was some kind of subversion
Some of my European friends were raving about how great this was. I checked the reviews and it seemed to agree with them so I put aside some time recently and watched and all I can say is it was just bad. The camera work, the lighting, the writing was all bad. The acting was good (especially Inde Navarrette) but was heavily kneecapped by there being no discernable characters to speak of but simply vessels for plot to happen to. I heard all this praise of how groundbreaking it was tackling all these serious issues (like consent and loss of agency) but then the closest it got was referencing these ideas and then moving on to the next schlocky horror checklist moment. I was really disappointed.
Sorry for the rant but this movie (mostly the discourse around it) has just been annoying me since I saw it.
OK so I'm not the only one noticing the weird glazing of "pretty good but nothing really new" horror movies coming out and any criticism being declared jealous cope?
Probably doesn't help that I'm as burnt out on horror as I am Marvel slop I tend to find most of the genre very samey in general and not usually very scary.
I'm also scared that they're going to ruin the SPC Foundation when this horror trend inevitability gets too many executive fingers in the pie and we end up with them doing the "OK these are the boxes needed to be ticked for success now, let's do it 500 times". Because Hollywood has already said they're now scraping internet horror stories for ideas.
A lot of people are really desperate for mainstream good movies that are shared cultural experiences, and in the absence of any more than one a year at best they're just pretending that anything new, thats somewhat different from the slop factory they're used to, is completely groundbreaking
Compounded by most people nowadays being critically illiterate and terrified of being judged by social media panopticon if they look stupid so just defaulting to excessive praise to prove they got it in the absence of anything more to say about it.
The fact that to my understanding Curry Barker was a B-tier internet comic who established a rather rabid fanbase probably contributes a lot in this case.
Too high praise for a movie that I would say failed both technically and thematically.
It’s interesting, if they did SCP it would probably be some sort of retro nostalgia bait around some famous entry like 173. Not sure how the licensing would work, but it seems like at this point the SCP community has moved on. A lot of new articles are overwritten novelletes, because so much has already been explored.
Yeah SCP is quite old now, very early internet horror.
I've really talked it to death on horror communities lol I am not in a position to criticize anyone else spending their rant points (wasn't trying to be a smuglord to the other person either, but I can see why it would be read that way). Making the male protagonist a slimeball is apparently enough to meet people's standards for biting social criticism
The entire movie was framed wrong (should have been from the victims perspective). A more competent writer/director could definitely make it work from the perpetrators perspective however Curry Barker is simply not that competent from what I've seen as the depths of his writing seems to begin and end with wow she's so crazy and erratic.