And The Blair Witch Project before that.

I hate to inform you that Paranormal Activity came out almost 20 years ago.

I'm anything but a backrooms fan but I particularly enjoyed this movie. I think it's best appreciated coming from the perspective that the backrooms is one of those ownerless shared fiction universes that almost never get adaptions with any sort of budget behind it for obvious reasons, much less when they have very niche or novel premises like 'noclipping out of reality to end up in procgen horror hallways'

I was keen to watch it because it made me fantasize that we might get some decent money behind an SCP project one day, they feel like very similar universes in how they have evolved.

complete with dumbed down exposition and an obsession with every minute detail having to have "lore."

I didn't think the Backrooms Movie was that exposition heavy. It did a good job at Showing rather than Telling.

While there was lore shit throughout, i had only seen the original short film, and knew nothing of the lore before going into the movie. So while there was stuff I could point to and be like "oh that's for the lore heads" most of it didn't phase me, because it also ended up being a satisfying set up for a later Chekhov's Gun payoff later in the film.

For example, the caveman standee. When it first showed up, I guessed it was probably some lore thing that I didn't get. But that didn't matter, because its purpose and origin was shown to me at the end of the film, by being utilized in the final chase sequence.

All the fact that the lore references still worked for me, despite me not knowing the lore, is a compliment to the film, tbh

Yeah, the video game influence on movies is driving me crazy. The stupid deal was 'if you want a good story, watch a movie instead of a game' and then the shitty game stories are starting to invade the movies and people are saying they're good, actually.

Although I'd be curious if anyone else here thinks there's a difference or not between ARG stuff and video game stories. Video game stuff feels more like comic book characters with lore and mechanics tacked onto the narrative whereas the ARG stuff is more like pastiche/collage-based since it's by/for younger people who haven't had time to develop their own style yet, lore-first with characters and dialogue only begrudgingly added, and focused on lots of disjointed, edgy visuals or poetry in some form.

right? wake me up when the base is shaping and influencing the superstructure again

lore

Five Nights at Freddie's and it's consequences

an obsession with every minute detail having to have "lore."

It sucks, but this probably came mainly either from certain types of genre fiction or movies like Star Wars

I don't wanna contest your take just for the hell of it but this feels really incongruent with what I watched. Whether the movie is great or mid is less of a concern to me than the video game comment. The movie felt very traditional to me, translating a very loose 'creepy-pasta' idea into a traditional horror movie format.

To that extent I personally thought the movie did great, but I guess I'm highlighting my disagreement because I don't think there's any video game influence on this movie. I know there are a lot of games themed after the backrooms but the concept itself is agnostic to video games, it's a communal/shared universe like SCP that spawned from a particularly fire paragraph-horror story.

You might appreciate it a bit more if you see it as less of a 'video game' movie and imagined it more as one person's big-budgeted interpretation of a cultural horror idea. Sorry if I've read the wrong implication from your post and you already knew all this stuff.