HORROR movie The Backrooms is being praised by critics for its clever liminal concept, but will audiences agree? Here are more terrifying ideas that don’t stand up to much scrutiny.
Annabelle
Here’s an idea: if you’re a demon, why not inhabit a doll that can easily be picked up by humans and placed in a glass case blessed by a priest that’s impossible for you to escape from? Well done, you’ve just put yourself in prison. Maybe possess something more mobile next time, like a kangaroo?
The Backrooms
The selling point is ‘liminal’ space, in this case a maze of office corridors that are spookily deserted. But from a cinematic point of view it’s extremely boring watching someone walking round an office, so there are scary monsters. They’ll turn you into goo and use it to make more backrooms. So that’s not liminal, it’s an entirely reasonable fear of being turned into goo.
Final Destination
Why are scientists and the world’s media not all over this? Death’s had six murder sprees thus far, plus all the millions (?) of slayings that weren’t in a film, and he always uses exactly the same MO. Forget needing to convince people Death is after you, most nights there’d be something on the news like: ‘The Home Office has launched a website with advice on what to do if you’ve cheated death and will now be killed in an entertainingly convoluted way.’
The Ring
Vengeful spirit Samara kills people who watch a cursed VHS tape, but when you consider all the stuff she gets up to – threatening phone calls, telepathy with a horse, mangling people to death – it’s clear she has near-limitless powers. The victims are effectively random, so why doesn’t she just go for a walk and kill everyone she sees? And why risk someone ending the curse by accidentally taping over it with Match of the Day?
Hereditary
A cult stalks a family, gradually weakening them psychologically until King of Hell Paimon can possess a male body, in this case the dickhead teenage son, all of which depends on a plan to kill his annoying sister in which a million things can go wrong. It would be so much easier to kidnap a depressed person Paimon can just hop into, but then Toni Collette couldn’t give a critically-acclaimed performance that makes you want to watch something more fun.
Sinister
Goth twat demon Bughuul has to do a phenomenal amount of planning to eat children’s souls, so it’s reasonable to ask for a bit more detail on this. Hasn’t science established that souls don’t exist? And if they do, isn’t it God who gives us souls? What if God’s annoyed with Bughuul messing with his creations? And just to clarify the eating bit, does he literally eat them, like with a knife and fork? Can you put them in the air fryer for a healthier option?
Longlegs
Boy, there was a lot of hype for this film in which the Devil gets fake nuns to deliver creepy lifesize dolls containing a mysterious metal sphere to families on their daughter’s birthday which causes the father to murder everyone. Who established this horribly complicated system for harvesting souls? There was none of this bollocks in The Devil Rides Out, proving once and for all things were better in the good old days.
