Best Jump Scare of the Year

I saw Backrooms this week. That’s one of the benefits of living with a teenager. As you might imagine, much of the film is light on dialogue and heavy on disorienting vibes. There’s a stretch in the middle that’s almost entirely wordless. No dialogue for minutes. Just the main character drifting deeper into nowhere while the score does that thing where it’s less music and more a low ambient hum designed to make your entire world feel a little off.

I found the first act of the movie a little slow, but by this point, I was pretty locked in.

And then every device in the theater went off at once.

Not one phone. Not a few. Every phone, all of them letting out that flat, escalating emergency siren at the exact same moment, like the building itself had started screaming. For about half a second my brain fully accepted that this was part of the movie. Of course it was. The Backrooms had reached through the screen and gotten us too.

It was a tornado watch.

(We were fine. Welcome to spring in the Midwest. I’ve been here almost 15 years and I’m just about used to it.)

It’s a great story, but in hindsight I keep thinking about everything that had to be true, all at once, for that moment to happen.

A 20-year-old made that movie. Kane Parsons started as a teenager posting a Backrooms video to YouTube, the kind of thing that goes viral and you assume becomes a fun footnote. Instead it became a web series, and then A24 handed him a real film, and now he’s the youngest director to ever open a movie at number one. Sure, The Blair Witch had to walk so Backrooms could run, but this still feels like a distinctly new thing. A creepypasta about liminal office hallways grew into the biggest opening in A24’s history. That alone is a sentence that would’ve made no sense a decade ago.

And the thing that interrupted it? A federal alert system, beamed to a satellite, pushed down to a cell tower, and fired into a dark room full of strangers and me. Wireless Emergency Alerts didn’t even exist until the 2010s. Smartphones capable of receiving them are barely older than the director.

So you’ve got a movie that only exists because of the internet, made by a kid who only got the chance because of the internet, interrupted by a warning that only reaches us because of a different layer of the same invisible infrastructure. All of it converging in a dark room to scare the daylights out of a bunch of people who’d paid to be scared anyway.

I don’t have a tidy lesson here. I just think it’s wild. The future showed up, made a horror movie, and then the future interrupted it to remind us a storm was coming.

Best jump scare of the year, and it wasn’t even in the script.

This post was co-authored with my agent assistant, Ryan Terry.