The guy sitting next to me put his fist up to celebrate when Bear tried to throw up the pills, so that guy. Glad it didn’t last long lol Can’t say I’ve abhorred a main character more than Bear in a really long time.
What are you guys talking about, Nikki is obviously the villain ...is something that guy would probably say
Despite Backrooms having a huge opening on Friday, this has gone up over its prior Friday by an estimated 33%, and for what I believe is the first time ever for a film that already has a wide opening, this could well go up for its third weekend.
I liked, but didn't love this. Maybe the hype got me, but I found it extremely straight forward in the end, not symbolism / cinematography wise, but just from a surface value plot regard. The acting was phenomenal, and i liked the sense of tension and dread that slowly built, but i thought there was going to be a bit more to it. I still walked away with mostly positive feelings about the movie (and mostly negative feelings because of well... the movie events). I guess one thing that really didn't fit / make sense was the phone call to the one wish willow company and what was supposed to be going on there. The whole, 'do you want to speak to her' part? Could have done without that imo. Not the phone call, but the idea that the actual Nikki was somehow able to communicate her torture via that method. It gave a weird sort of agency / there's some bad spooky people out there controlling the wishes, vs it being a completely random twisting of the wish / more magical based
Well I’m glad horror is having a “moment” right now, and I’m glad it’s being spearheaded by younger people. And I’m glad people are going to the theater for original films. And I’m glad Star Wars 38 is underperforming. Let’s keep moving in this direction.
That part was so unnerving to me and totally worked. I love that it's never explained how the heck they got her on the line. Made me wonder where the call center is, what they have access to, and how. I also like how Curry played the customer service care rep so lethargically. It made it funny, but more unnerving cause it feels less like your standard spooky people and more like bored people who inexplicably have access to some horrible stuff, which adds to the uncanniness of it all.
All that felt of a piece with the cynicism/detachment of the employees at the occult store. No one's getting paid enough to even be a proper Voice of Doom anymore.
I think this is why I liked this movie a whole lot, because the plot is very simple and it relies simply on acting, atmosphere, and unnerving moments and wasn't just filled with jump scare after jump scare as the horror device. And it worked.
The customer service call is great for the same reason the occult store employee is - it's the absurdism of how nonchalant they are about insane, life-changing information. How do they know as much as they do? Why doesn't the existence of magic or soul-trapping via cheap product change everything we know about the world? We aren't supposed to have clear-cut explanations because they're more effective (either scarier, funnier, or both) without them.
Agree to an extent. It's a small quibble in the end and I have had similar complaints regarding other horror movies as it's a genre I'm newer to. Been a scaredy cat my whole life, and I don't necessarily approach them with horror genre conventions in mind. IE - it's acceptable / normal to leave a lot up to the imagination / unexplained.
Honestly, it's something refreshing here as a lot of horror (especially recently) has been overexplaining or not explaining enough depending on the film and subject matter. (Osgood Perkins in particular is guilty of the latter.) I feel like this and Backrooms both managed to create worlds that felt fleshed out while leaving just enough questions unanswered.
It’s generally best to explain as little as possible, it always kind of makes things less scary. Mystery is the key to good horror. I think this did a good job, they had fun trying to explain it but also didn’t really answer much and the scene just felt weird. If anything I thought Backrooms could have used some more lore, they kind of just vaguely explained what’s happening in the exact same way a few times. The sauce in both these movies is the weird stuff happening tho, and if they stopped to explain it you lose that intrigue.
It was such a fun double-feature seeing this and Backrooms together because both movies deal so heavily with the uncanny, but in different ways. Obviously, all horror movies are uncanny to an extent, but the spaces in Backrooms and what Inde does in this movie are two of the most extreme examples I've seen. Definitely felt nice to get back to reality afterward. Ha.
Some of the uncanny stuff she does in this are just as hilarious as they are terrifying ( such as when she did the “rewind” walk backwards into the dark, and some of the whining she did lol)
Whatever they’re doing to make those two shots of her backward motion feel so unnerving is effective for sure. They kind of look sped up or something, or like reversed footage of her moving forward. Or maybe she really is just hittin the choreo. The first time it happens feels like when you see a spider retreat
Just got out of this and bear’s phone going off on the nightstand when Sarah texts him while Nikki was sleeping on his shoulder scared the absolute fuck out of me lol Really liked this and Inde deserves all the hype
Obviously what both movies have managed is very impressive, but Obsession pulling in this kind of dough with no movie stars, no big-name horror producers and less than 1/10 the budget of Backrooms (not to mention, no pre-existing online lore/imagery to riff off of or pull audience from!) is more on the level of what The Blair Witch Project pulled off.