One crafty writer’s never-say-die quest to tell a story for the page or screen.

Hey! I’m that guy trying to sell my latest screenplay, publish it as a novel or die trying.

In DIE TRYING, you will get an unvarnished look at a bitterly honest writer struggling to make it. No name-dropping or Hollywood phoniness. Just the facts ma’am on what the media landscape is really like behind the curtain.

In TODAY’S ISSUE, we get deformed with trauma after watching the horror hit Backrooms.

I’ve given up my dream of being a screenwriter. I’ve decided to be a stage dad instead!

I’m going to have another kid. When baby is in womb, I’m going to introduce him to famous horror soundtracks. You know, John Carpenter’s score from Halloween. When the kid pops out, I'm going to play him bone-chilling scenes from The Exorcist, my personal horror fav.

You think this is kinda extreme, kinda bad parenting, right? Well, I have a plan. I’m stage-managing my kid to be a famous horror director by the time he hits puberty. When he signs his three-picture deal, I’ll be off in the corner, counting the cash.

In all seriousness, today we study the screenplay from the breakout horror film Backrooms, written by Will Soodik and directed by Kane Parsons, who is all of 20 years old!

I wish I could say it was the folly of youth, but no! Karsons’ Backrooms is a lesson in exorcising trauma (or lack thereof).

 BACKROOMS IS A TRAUMA DUMP

Backrooms starts with traditional scary stuff: a POV camera of a guy in a hazmat suit traversing eerie, puke-yellow corridors lit by unsettling, flickering fluorescent lights. He is attacked by something, an unseen monster maybe?

After the bloody found-footage opening, the film features a female voiceover explaining how adults who are going nowhere try the same solutions to their problems over and over. In vain.

We get a surreal opening of a little girl and her mother planting their hands in freshly poured concrete outside of a new suburban home. Soodik and Parsons use the handprint as a central Rosebud-like plant-and-payoff device.

We think the female voice is the narrator, but Kane cuts to a therapist’s office where Mary Kline interviews Clark, a boozing furniture store owner who dreamed of being an architect and is bitter about his divorce.

We get backstory in their therapy role play that Clark is going nowhere, a broken man.

We later see that Mary Kline is in the same boat. In flashback dreams, we see her trapped as an older girl in the living room of the filthy home that she and her mom occupy. It is the now-decrepit home that had the earlier hopeful handprints in the driveway cement, placed by mother and daughter. Mom is mentally ill and forbids her daughter from leaving the house, which is eventually demolished for a shopping mall.

Both characters suffer from trauma that they can’t move past. They find a trauma dump in the liminal Van Gogh yellow corridors in the basement of Clark’s furniture store.

Clark becomes obsessed with this extradimensional space as a means of escaping his drab existence of booze and bitterness. Without giving away too much, Clark becomes consumed and a monster eventually stalks Mary Kline through the backrooms. In the climax of Act III, it pins her to the ground, about to feed on her and presumably kill her.

The therapist smashes the monster in the head with the totemic chunk of concrete cut from her childhood driveway. Here, screenwriter Soodik pays off what he planted in the opening. The therapist’s symbol of trauma becomes a weapon. Earlier, Clark explains to a tied-up Mary Kline that monsters are deformed memories. Mary Kline, just as emotionally stunted as Clark, is literally stalked on a different level by childhood trauma manifested as a monster.

Backrooms becomes a trauma dump. In one shot, Mary Kline is processing a room with a passage in it. Parsons cuts to the decrepit living room from her childhood. The camera cranes down into multiple lower rooms, each more minimal and barren, until we end up in an empty, sickly-yellow room with an arch as an opening. The video game aesthetic of multiplayer levels takes on an interior meaning: multilayers of grief and trauma that chase the two leads like monsters.

In the last shot, we see a deformed character. A memory permanently trapped in the backrooms or maze-like labyrinth of one’s twisted psyche.

The film is not a hopeful meditation on growth but a horror show on the inability to get past damage.

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