The new horror film that everyone is talking about, Backrooms, has shot straight to the top of the Australian box office.
For the weekend of May 28th-31st, the movie, directed by Kane Parsons, debuted at No. 1 with $5.52 million across 313 screens. With a per-screen average of $17,637 — the best in the top ten by a significant margin — it’s shaping up to be one of the year’s biggest horror releases.
“When a Bay Area teenager named Kane Parsons began posting shorts on his YouTube channel about a series of liminal spaces titled The Backrooms, he ended up turning the fodder for a 4chan thread into a viral online-horror sensation. Presented largely as found footage and involving an elliptical mythology around an organisation known as the Async Research Institute, these clips had a way of burrowing under your skin and into your psyche,” Rolling Stone wrote in its review.
“The question wasn’t whether Parsons would attract the attention of producer-directors like James Wan and Osgood Perkins, or the good people at A24 so much as when he’d level up into a larger hipster-horror platform.
“His feature debut, Backrooms, takes the premise of those shorts and runs with them; it’s the carbonara of creepypasta cinema, adding savoury Kubrickian elements to its source material’s heavily salted Blair Witch Project videocam style and displaying an inventiveness that makes up for any sense of derivativeness. The fact that the concept not only made the leap to longform but sustains its nightmare-logic narrative with such unsettling effectiveness is impressive enough. That it milks so much out of a minimalistic idea revolving around an MC-Escher-playing-Minecraft aesthetic feels like a mild evolutionary blip within the genre.”
Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu dropped to second spot after its opening weekend at the top, taking $3.15 million despite a 51 per cent fall. Obsession agains holds strong at No. 3 in its third week. The thriller jumped 87 per cent after expanding to 245 screens, taking $3.03 million to push its total to $7.08 million.
Meanwhile, Michael Jackson biopic Michael and The Devil Wears Prada 2 continue their quiet dominance of the year’s cumulative chart, sitting at $40.5 million and $38.71 million respectively.
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On the new entries front, H is for Hawk debuted at $112,677 from just 157 screens, while Paul Rudd and Nick Jonas’ Power Ballad opened similarly quietly at $119,224 from 219 screens, and Chardikala rounded out the new arrivals at $133,033 from 43 screens.
