By Chastity Morgan
I recently saw Backrooms, Kane Parson’s directorial debut starring Chiwetel Ejofor (Clark) and Renate Reinsve (Dr. Mary). Backrooms is a psychological thriller set in the late 1990s. The main character, Clark, is an unfulfilled furniture store owner and divorcee who is working through his resentments with life with Dr. Mary. One night, Clark finds an invisible door in the basement wall of his furniture store. He embarks on an eerie journey through endless backrooms filled with stuff and distorted creatures that he refers to as “everything that once was.” Clark thinks of the space as “memories” that become distorted the longer they stay in the backrooms.
I couldn’t tell you exactly what Kane Parsons was thinking when he wrote a script about the vintage 1990s. Are backrooms where we hold our individual traumas? Is it the place in our minds where we recreate our memories, hoping that one day we will finally “just be okay” with the events of our past that continue to haunt us? Or are backrooms literal spaces where outdated materials like VCRs, floppy disks, answering machines, and Walkman’s are stored until some hipster finds them? I took a latter approach to the film. If you asked me what’s in my backrooms, I would say movies. I realize movies aren’t a thing of the past per se, but streaming has made the movie experience substantially different.
For as long as I can remember, movies have been at the center of my life. My earliest movie memory is of when my sister would babysit me, and I would get to watch a back-to-back screening of Howard the Duck and Pee Wee’s Great Adventure. Then on most Sundays, I would go to my grandparents’ house for our Sunday routine. My grandmother would drag my grandfather and me to church where he would fall sleep, and I would bite my nails until they bled. But I would slug through the homily because I knew I would be rewarded with a warm apple pie from McDonald’s and a movie. Most of the movies we saw were G or PG, until 2004 when my grandparents took me (their 20-year-old granddaughter) to see Meet the Fockers, which was much more risqué than the prequel Meet the Parents. I left the theater with a mortified grandmother who looked at me with the sweetest eyes and said, “I’m sorry I took you to such a dirty movie.”
My father was less prudish about movies, that was until I got older. I didn’t think twice when he took 7-year-old me to see Point Break and made me close my eyes during the naked fight scene with Julia Michaels and Keanu Reeves. This all changed though on one fateful night when I came home from college for a visit and my mother was working a night game at the Giants AT&T Park (now Oracle). When she worked late, my father and I would rent a movie from Blockbuster. We went to the video store and perused the shop for what felt like forever. Finally, I said to him, “Hey, my friend said he watched a good movie called Sleeping Dogs Lie.” We went over to the Indy section and read the VHS case, “A woman has a dark secret that she discloses to her fiancé.” I mean, okay, how bad could the secret be?
The opening scene of Sleeping Dogs Lie is of Amy (Melinda Page) spitting into a bathroom sink. The screen pans out to a dog rolling on his back, and Amy saying, “That’s right, I blew my dog.” I sat next to my dad in silence staring at the TV screen. I couldn’t even make eye contact with the guy. As I sat there listening to Amy talk about the size of her dog’s dick, I started giving myself a pep talk, “You’re 22 years old. You’re a mature adult. You can watch a sex scene in a movie with your dad without it being awkward.” Now when I was a teen my rebellious move was to run out of the room, but in my 20s it was to stay right where I was. Finally, my father paused the movie and said, “Go to your room.” I thankfully left as he finished the movie. When I asked him how it was, he said, “What kind of sick fucking friends do you have?” I immediately called Jeremy who recommended the movie. I told him about what happened. As he laughed, he said, “I didn’t think you were going to watch it with your dad. That’s disgusting.”
Movies weren’t just a part of my family life; they bonded me and my friends. In high school, my friend Vanessa and I would reiterate movie lines to each other and guess the film. In college, I met Amy who I was roommates with until she graduated from Humboldt and moved away. We were connected at the hip. We walked to school together. During long breaks between classes, we would watch movies in the library cubbies that were equipped with a 14-inch screen and headphones. We especially loved the foreign films—Deepa Mehta’s films Fire, Water, and Earth and Pedro Almodovar’s, All About My Mother and Volver. Then we walked home together and made sure to stop by Spotlight Theater where we would chat with the movie clerks Nick and Steph who would guide us toward their favorite new releases. This was our 4-year routine, and I loved it.
Just last week, a judge allowed Paramount Skydance to acquire Warner Brothers Discovery. For those of you who may not know, the merger was initially stalled because of violations concerning antitrust laws. Just because the merger is allowed to go through, it is still problematic for bringing CNN and CBS under one corporate umbrella. But what is more frightening is what will happen to the movie theater. Apparently, Paramount has agreed to release at least 30 films a year in theaters for the next 5 years. I hope they follow through.
The movie experience is already so much more individual than it once was. I miss wandering through a movie rental store with 20 other strangers on a Friday night rather than sitting on my couch doomscrolling through the endless supply of movies, most of which I never even heard of. I miss watching a movie with 30 strangers and hearing the social commentary as I leave the theater. I miss the collective laughs, jump scares, and the crowd warning Sidney Prescott to go out the front door instead of running up the stairs. Most importantly, I don’t know if there’s enough space in my backrooms for movie theaters. It’s already cluttered with VCRs, VHSs, and DVDs (I never got into the Blue Ray craze).
If you’re looking for some good films and don’t want to waste your time wading through garbage, here’s some must see recent movies in no specific order:
Sirat (2025)
The Weight (2026)
Godzilla Minus One (2021)
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (2026)
Friendship (2024)
The Power of the Dog (2021)
Obsession (2025)
The Brutalist (2024)
On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (2025)
Sing Sing (2024)
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