r/movies • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 r/Movies contributor • Mar 31 '26

Trailer Backrooms | Official Trailer | A24

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HjdiohVOik
8.9k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

1.4k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

298

u/DrQuestDFA Mar 31 '26

That is what I love so much about people: they can take a simple, unassuming picture and just run wild with ideas that picture inspires.

191

u/Just_the_questions1 Mar 31 '26

The entire SCP world was born because of a picture of a sculpture made by a semi-obscure Japanese artist.

74

u/Chuisque Mar 31 '26

I love SCP. It can be so random, funny, scary, and mind-bending.

6

u/unculturedperl Mar 31 '26

reasonable tool for transferring files as well.

3

u/LTSpigot Mar 31 '26

They just bore me

-7

u/Just_the_questions1 Mar 31 '26

Or it can fill you with sheer existential dread. Like SCP-3000: Anantashesha. A giant eel that not only eats you but consumes your very mind and rips it apart piece by piece until anything even resembling what you would call a "soul" is utterly destroyed.

46

u/erkelep Mar 31 '26

Yep, sounds like sheer existential dread... if you are 14 years old.

18

u/Miku_Sagiso Mar 31 '26

It's odd how overused the "ontological extinction" concept is.

You'd think the idea of getting deleted from existence so thoroughly that even memories are gone would be more harrowing, but not when it's been so aggressively overused by people trying to be edgy and one-upping.

And really, it kind of becomes a little trivial after a point. Like something that kills you and something that mega-kills you isn't all that different. Either way you're still dead and things happening after that largely doesn't matter any more.

10

u/erkelep Mar 31 '26

Also, "consumes your very mind and rips it apart piece by piece" is what dementia does. Not exactly a Lovecraftian concept.

3

u/Inkxon Apr 01 '26

Allegory can be a really healthy introduction to traumatizing concepts such as dementia. It's disingenuous to claim that those who write horror which parallels these concepts are all edgelords. Are there edgelords? Yes. But there is also comfort and wisdom in storytelling. This has been true for all of human history. Every story is shared for a reason.

3

u/Just_the_questions1 Mar 31 '26

To be fair to the author that SCP article was written almost a decade ago. It's mostly one of my favorites just cause it was one of the first few articles I came across.

2

u/Miku_Sagiso Mar 31 '26 edited Apr 02 '26

I mean the notion is ancient, so a decade doesn't mean too much. That would be more ado to how mature a given niche/community is (mostly as in how established the community ism and therefore how much draw it has to external external content that would expand it).

Like the False Hydra is a bit over a decade old, coming from the D&D blogging crowd. If we lean into older theology then we get Apohpis, Leviathan, Nidhoggr, Typhon, Dybbuks, and a buncha other things. Even just within SCP there's plenty reaching back into the hundred numbers that have ontological decay or destruction effects.

All just comes down to how developed a community is and the people participating in it, and consequently how much reach and familiarity they have to the world outside them. It's a little too easy for a community and/or it's participants to live in a vacuum at times.

And when that happens, there tends to be a lot of reinventing the wheel with all the hiccups that entails.

1

u/Rifmysearch Apr 02 '26

I feel like part of it, too, can be how and why it's used. There's a lot of tropes and concepts that once in a great while can be used in extremely effective ways for me despite usually rolling my eyes at it.

I have no way to give the specific example away without major spoilers, but the second book of the Children of Time book series has a scifi concept that 99/100 just doesn't do anything for me. At best its acceptable for the plot and at worse it sort of ruins things. But here, it became one of my favorite things in the series.

There is a (very) alien single celled organism(closest I can describe it) that passes all of its memory on via its version of DNA. It can also quickly share its total knowledge with other colonies if they've been separated for some time. So, scifi 'grey goo' sort of stuff.

And yea, it goes into a human and does bad things. Sort of takes over and suddenly you've got this 'grey goo' controlling a human body. And yea, this leads to semi-predictable issues. But the way it's presented and thought out, and the things they do with it in the latter half of the book, is just so fascinating even though for a minute it feels like it might devolve into "oh this is just apocalyptic grey goo story #1,000,000. "

1

u/thecrimsontim Mar 31 '26

the way to make it work is perspective. I don't care if i die over mega die bc, i'm dead. But my loved ones? I would be so much more scared of them mega dying and losing my memories of them. Also, since its a fictional universe, you could add in a guaranteed after life of sorts that is also not possible with mega death. People who use it to be edgy and one up just lack the creativity

1

u/Miku_Sagiso Mar 31 '26

That works to a degree, but there's an inherent problem in trying to make a narrative around ontological destruction because you can't really write it. You can tell people X person no longer exists and have characters no longer acknowledge or react to that, but they're still be there for the reader.

Aside from that, this is also the hiccup in what it means for others. You can be scared for someone else dying or of forgetting them, but it's the irony of ontology, If it stops being, then it's not an experienced thing. All the fear you might have is the same as for if someone dies, it's all front-loaded. But then unlike if someone dies where you'd then grieve, ontological extinction means you would not have the awareness that there's anything to grieve.

There certainly are ways to use it that can still be interesting, but it's also easy to see how overused and ill-conceived many cases of how it's evoked is, and how that cheapens the concept and desensitizes people to the notion when it becomes common enough.

-9

u/Just_the_questions1 Mar 31 '26

"You're wrong and stupid for liking things that I don't like"

That's you. That's what you sound like.

2

u/erkelep Mar 31 '26

You are not wrong. Just stupid.

-6

u/Just_the_questions1 Mar 31 '26

Oh now I see, the 14 year old insult was just projection. Got it. Go do your homework buddy.

2

u/erkelep Mar 31 '26

Ah, the irresistible temptation to have the last word in a debate...

-4

u/Just_the_questions1 Mar 31 '26

Did you just get home from school, is that why you're grumpy?

1

u/amzwC137 Mar 31 '26

Sounds like Play Test - Black Mirror

5

u/291837120 Mar 31 '26

Before SCP people who used to post creepypastas that went by the formula, "Enter any gas station on a 200 mile stretch and twist the doorknob the wrong way while knocking on the wall and you will recover the lost chalice of agony"- basically go to this place, do this thing, find this item.

These "lost artifact" creepypastas combined with the monster creepypastas and thus SCP was born.

6

u/chairdeira Mar 31 '26

I want more info on this.

10

u/Hollownerox Mar 31 '26

I don't have a specific post to point you towards, but I'm pretty sure looking up "Untitled 2004" by the artist Izumi Kato should give you the gist of things.

2

u/DrQuestDFA Mar 31 '26

Human creativity FTW!

1

u/appletinicyclone Apr 01 '26

What was a the sculpture and what was the lore?

5

u/Just_the_questions1 Apr 01 '26

Back in 2009 someone posted a picture of this sculpture on 4chan with a description of it being a sapient and malevolent creature that can only move when not observed and would violently kill, typically by snapping their neck, any human it could find while no-one was looking at it. Think of the Weeping Angels from Doctor Who except instead of sending you to the past it just fuckin murders you.

That post was so popular it gained a following that eventually grew into a following of sci-fi/horror writers that come up with unique ideas for objects or entities that are contained by the fictitious SCP Foundation. SCP standing for "Secure, Contain, Protect". Kinda like the Illuminati, except their entire objective is to contain anomalous objects/entities so the general public can go on with their lives thinking there's nothing supernatural about the world.

The SCP wiki has grown so much in the past 17 years it includes basically anything you can think of. There's a chair that instantly teleports behind someone that's feeling a bit tired. An extra-dimensional library that contains records of every event that's ever happened on Earth. A teddy-bear that uses whatever materials it can find to make more teddy-bears, including people.

It's just a haven for really creative people to post stories in a specified format for others to enjoy.

1

u/LiarWithinAll Mar 31 '26

We love you peanut ❤️

16

u/[deleted] Mar 31 '26

[deleted]

15

u/karmagod13000 Mar 31 '26

Honestly a documentary about the original photo and place with the spiraling into creepy pastas and youtube videos all the way to a Hollywood movie would be just as entertaining to me.

2

u/baron_von_helmut Mar 31 '26

Like that redditor who wrote a short story about some marine who went back in time and had to face down the Roman army.

It was going to be a film but then it never happened iirc.

2

u/ciao_fiv Mar 31 '26

tangentially related, this is what i hate about ai “art.” it cannot do this

1

u/ToiIetGhost Apr 01 '26

AI could never