For this month’s post, we’re going to need some context. You see, my siblings and I are big gamers (though you might have already guessed that from some of my previous posts). The end of this month also happens to be my brother’s birthday, and because ribbing my siblings on the internet is part of the job of Big Sister, I can honestly say it’s always been a struggle to find something to do to celebrate his next trip around the sun. But, as the planets have mysteriously aligned for this singular point in time, he actually found what he wanted to do before we had to start bothering him about it.

Now that my obligatory teasing is out of the way, back to the first part. The thing my brother wants to do to ring in his next year is to go see Backrooms. It’s a stacked cast horror film based on a short YouTube video posted by the then sixteen-year-old director, inspired by an anonymous forum post that escaped into the wider internet. Yeah. Quite the rabbit hole. It escaped so far that there’s even a video game adaptation of it, which is crazy to think about when all the original post was, was of an unsettling, empty yellow hallway with an equally unsettling short story about blipping through reality (turns out it was just a well-composed photograph of an under-renovation Wisconsin store, though. The more you know). But when my brother first showed any of this to me, I had barely an idea of what it was. I looked at the movie trailer, the game trailer, and part of the Wikipedia page and thought, “wait… isn’t this just House of Leaves?”