‘Backrooms’ Takes You Deeper Inside the Internet’s Most Uncanny Horror Myth
‘Backrooms’ Takes You Deeper Inside the Internet’s Most Uncanny Horror Myth
《后室》（Backrooms）：带你深入互联网最诡异的恐怖传说
The 20-year-old filmmaker Kane Parsons has risen to the top so fast that he’s had zero time to process how far he’s come. 20 岁的电影制作人凯恩·帕森斯（Kane Parsons）蹿红的速度如此之快，以至于他根本没有时间去消化自己已经取得了多大的成就。
“It’s been go, go, go,” Parsons tells WIRED. “Even the tiniest bit of a break,” he says, would give him some better perspective on everything that’s happened over the past few years. But for the moment, he’s soaking up the limelight—and thinks it’ll be at least another month before he has the space to reflect on his big break. “一切都在马不停蹄地进行，”帕森斯告诉《连线》（WIRED）杂志。“哪怕能有片刻的休息，”他说，都能让他对过去几年发生的一切有更清晰的认识。但目前，他正沉浸在聚光灯下——他认为至少还要再过一个月，他才有空间去反思自己这次重大的突破。
Backrooms, a moody horror piece that stars Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve, is a cerebral expansion of Parsons’ atmospheric YouTube web series of the same name. It marks his feature debut as A24’s youngest director to date, at the helm of a movie long anticipated by a huge and hungry internet fan base. You could hardly ask for a better kick start to summer blockbuster season. 《后室》是一部由切瓦特·埃加福特（Chiwetel Ejiofor）和蕾娜特·赖因斯夫（Renate Reinsve）主演的忧郁恐怖片，它是帕森斯在 YouTube 上同名氛围感网剧的智性扩展。这是他作为 A24 迄今为止最年轻的导演的长片处女作，执导了一部备受庞大且饥渴的互联网粉丝群体期待已久的电影。对于暑期档大片的开局来说，这简直是再好不过的选择了。
Yet Parsons makes his meteoric success sound like something of an accident. “I never went into making that first short or making the series with the intention of, ‘I want to do this so I can prove to Hollywood that this is an engine that is viable for a film,’” he says. 然而，帕森斯却把自己的迅速成功描述得像是一场意外。“我制作第一部短片或拍摄这个系列时，从来没有想过：‘我想这样做是为了向好莱坞证明，这是一个可行的电影引擎，’”他说。
That original nine-minute video, titled “The Backrooms (Found Footage)” and uploaded by Parsons in 2022, was inspired by—of all things—a sinister 4chan meme that spawned a collaborative mythology. The 2019 post on the notorious image board’s /x/ forum included a disquieting photo of an empty hallway bathed in sickly light. An anonymous user described being transported into “the Backrooms, where it’s nothing but the stink of old, moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in.” 那部最初时长九分钟、由帕森斯于 2022 年上传的视频，标题为《后室（伪纪录片）》（The Backrooms (Found Footage)），其灵感竟然源自一个在 4chan 上诞生的邪恶模因，并由此衍生出了一套集体神话。2019 年，在这个臭名昭著的图片论坛的 /x/ 版块上，有人发布了一张令人不安的照片：一条沐浴在病态光线下的空荡走廊。一位匿名用户描述自己被传送到了“后室，那里只有陈旧潮湿的地毯味、单调黄色的疯狂、荧光灯嗡嗡作响的无尽背景噪音，以及大约六亿平方英里的随机分割的空房间，让人被困其中。”
“God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you,” the 4chan user added. “如果听到附近有什么东西在游荡，上帝保佑你，因为它肯定已经听到你了，”那位 4chan 用户补充道。
Other people took up the concept, creating spinoff imagery and stories on various social platforms. Parsons encountered these, as well as then-popular memes about surreal liminal spaces—the Backrooms being a paranormal extension of this phenomenon. He was intrigued by what this material evoked but felt it hadn’t been fully explored. 其他人接过了这个概念，在各大社交平台上创作了衍生图像和故事。帕森斯接触到了这些内容，以及当时流行的关于超现实“阈限空间”（liminal spaces）的模因——“后室”正是这一现象的超自然延伸。他被这些素材所唤起的感觉深深吸引，但觉得它尚未被完全挖掘。
“It was clearly scratching something that I didn’t really see much other media scratching,” he says. “I think there was an element of like, I wish there was more for me to engage with here.” “它显然触及了一些我没在其他媒体中看到的东西，”他说。“我觉得有一种感觉是，我希望这里有更多东西能让我去探索。”
To that end, Parsons decided to see whether he could conjure an immersive vision of the Backrooms with Blender 3D graphics software and Adobe After Effects. That initial video, in which a person is chased through the Backrooms by a malevolent life-form, went massively viral, with viewers marveling at Parsons’ technical skill and the chilling suspense he’d created. Fans excitedly speculated on the larger mythology of the uncanny setting. Within a month, studios were approaching Parsons with hopes for a full-length movie. 为此，帕森斯决定尝试用 Blender 3D 图形软件和 Adobe After Effects 软件，看看能否构筑出一个沉浸式的“后室”愿景。那部最初的视频中，一个人在后室里被一个邪恶的生命体追赶，视频迅速走红，观众们对帕森斯的专业技术和他营造的令人毛骨悚然的悬疑感赞叹不已。粉丝们兴奋地推测着这个诡异场景背后的宏大神话。不到一个月，各大制片厂就纷纷找上门来，希望能将其拍成电影长片。
Although still a teenager at the time, Parsons knew enough to be wary of the offers. “I was very distrustful of pretty much everything that was happening, just because I feel like it’s a very common experience for that sort of event to turn into nothing,” he says. “Or you end up with less than nothing.” 尽管当时还是个青少年，帕森斯却足够警惕这些邀约。“我对当时发生的一切都非常不信任，因为我觉得这种事情最后往往会不了了之，”他说。“或者最终的结果还不如什么都没发生。”
Ultimately, however, he got what a young filmmaker dreams of: the chance to pursue his vision, in this case with top talent at his side. The feature film has a script by Homeland and Westworld writer Will Soodik, and its producers include horror maestros Osgood Perkins and James Wan. 然而最终，他得到了年轻电影人梦寐以求的机会：去追求自己的愿景，而且还有顶尖人才在旁协助。这部长片的剧本由《国土安全》和《西部世界》的编剧威尔·苏迪克（Will Soodik）操刀，制片人则包括恐怖片大师奥斯古德·帕金斯（Osgood Perkins）和温子仁（James Wan）。
Backrooms is vivid, self-assured, and richly suffused with fluorescent dread. Ejiofor plays Clark, a problem-drinking divorcé who lives in his failing furniture store in San Jose, California, nursing a sense of victimhood that masks volcanic anger. In sessions with his therapist Mary (Reinsve), he tries to understand the patterns of behavior that have gotten him stuck in life—the wrong turns that led to the end of his marriage and thwarted his dreams of becoming an architect. Clark doesn’t know it, but Mary is also trapped in her memories. As a child, her agoraphobic mother kept her locked inside, with yellowing newspaper pasted over the windows. 《后室》画面生动、自信，且充斥着浓郁的荧光恐惧感。埃加福特饰演克拉克（Clark），一个酗酒的离异男子，住在加州圣何塞一家经营不善的家具店里，怀揣着一种掩盖内心火山般愤怒的受害者心态。在与心理医生玛丽（赖因斯夫饰）的咨询中，他试图理解那些让他陷入生活困境的行为模式——那些导致他婚姻破裂、阻碍他成为建筑师梦想的错误转折。克拉克不知道的是，玛丽也被困在自己的记忆中。小时候，她患有广场恐惧症的母亲把她锁在屋里，窗户上贴满了泛黄的报纸。
Late one night, when the lights in Clark’s store are on the fritz as usual, he walks downstairs to his showroom to investigate the faulty circuit breaker. That’s when he notices a glowing seam in the wall that defies any rational explanation. To his astonishment, he finds it marks a spot where he can walk right through the plaster and into another, even more purgatorial world: a labyrinth of never-ending rooms, many of them containing objects and structural features that look familiar on first glance—but are somehow off. Mesmerized, he returns regularly, trying to map out the endless sprawl and find any sign of life. (Suffice to say, he is not alone in there.) 一天深夜，当克拉克店里的灯光像往常一样闪烁不定时，他下楼到展厅去检查故障的断路器。就在那时，他注意到墙上有一道无法用理性解释的、发光的缝隙。令他震惊的是，他发现这道缝隙是一个入口，他可以直接穿过墙壁，进入另一个更加炼狱般的世界：一个由无尽房间组成的迷宫，其中许多房间里的物体和结构特征乍看之下很熟悉，但又有些不对劲。他被深深吸引，开始定期返回，试图绘制出这片无尽蔓延空间的地图，并寻找任何生命迹象。（不用说，他在那里并不孤单。）
Parsons’ great challenge was to make a movie that could both satisfy obsessive fans and draw newcomers into the paradox at the heart of his ongoing narrative. “Online, there’s often a very avid community—and you know mine is this way—but I feel like you have to be careful not to lean too hard into it,” he says, noting that these “problem-solvers” and “puzzle-oriented people” build up huge theories that can end up weighing an idea down. 帕森斯面临的最大挑战是制作一部既能满足狂热粉丝，又能将新观众带入他持续叙事核心悖论的电影。“在网上，通常有一个非常热情的社区——你知道我的粉丝群就是这样——但我认为你必须小心，不要过度依赖他们，”他说，并指出这些“问题解决者”和“热衷于解谜的人”会构建出庞大的理论，最终反而可能让一个创意变得沉重。
That’s probably why Backrooms withholds any big answers and leaves you with a discomfiting mystery. It’s set in the 1990s, which also means that Clark can’t go to Google with his questions, nor can he upload videos of the rooms to YouTube and solicit opinions on what the hell he’s experiencing. (“And he can’t fly a drone down there,” Parsons adds.) The absence of the internet as we know it in a tale collectively conjured across social media is a curious and clever inversion. 这可能就是为什么《后室》没有给出任何明确的答案，而是留下了一个令人不安的谜团。故事背景设定在 20 世纪 90 年代，这意味着克拉克无法带着问题去谷歌搜索，也不能把房间的视频上传到 YouTube 上去征求意见，询问他到底经历了什么。（“而且他也没法在那里放无人机，”帕森斯补充道。）在一个通过社交媒体集体构想出来的故事中，剔除我们所熟知的互联网，这是一种既奇特又聪明的反转。
Diehards will still have plenty to chew on—including Clark’s own eerie hypothesis about these confounding passageways. In their impossible geometry, the Backrooms owe something to the Overlook Hotel of The Shining, keepi 死忠粉们依然会有很多值得深思的内容——包括克拉克本人对这些令人困惑的通道所提出的诡异假设。在它们那不可能的几何结构中，《后室》借鉴了《闪灵》中全景酒店（Overlook Hotel）的某些元素……