As a custodian, my coworkers consist of mostly women. In my five years working there I can count on one hand how many men have been on the team. Most of them have been older, but one time we had a guy about my age there. He was completely new to town. He was getting away from toxic family members and this was the only job that accepted him quickly. I didn’t really have any friends at work at the time since my other coworkers were all much older than me, so when he began singling out my company, I was eager to finally make a friend. Plus, him and I weren’t so different: I had also moved to my town to escape from my family and was working at the place easiest available to me. I knew how it felt to completely start over. There was a shared foundation between us. I showed him around town and tried to help him integrate into the community.
About a week after first talking to me and some casual intermittent texting, he told me I was pretty. I saw where it was going and shut it down, telling him I don’t date coworkers. He took it well and I thought we moved past it. However, every time we talked afterwards he began bringing up how it was “a shame I don’t date coworkers”. He said other things like that, designed to guilt trip my emotions into reconsidering him as a love interest. I was firm in telling him we were just friends every time I felt him push. He would stop after I said that, only to push again later on. Finally, in the middle of a completely different conversation with zero romantic undertones, he texted me that I was “a perfect woman” the second week after meeting me. I stared at that text for a while, wondering how he could even know that. He hardly even knew me.
In the two weeks leading up to that “perfect woman” text, all the negativity he felt about his life, himself, and his family flooded our conversations, drowning out anything else that was said. I listened and supported, but began to find myself not really existing much outside of himself every time we spoke. He had a habit of interrupting me with abrupt subject changes if I began speaking about myself for longer than a thirty seconds, sometimes only to keep at the same romantic pestering I’d been telling him to give up on. Whereas I had made an effort to know him, he lacked fundamental curiosity about me as a person and never asked questions unless it was related to my love life. He didn’t know my opinions on art or politics, or what I wanted to do with my life. At the heart of it, he didn’t know enough about me to be in love with me; I was just the only woman there. What a perfect woman was to him was fundamentally disturbing: a woman who is the nearest one around, whose innate inner world he never has to acknowledge, whose opinions he never has to listen to. She exists as pristine empty vessel that can only be filled by his projections and feelings.
I had become a receptacle to him, both physically and emotionally. This is a role of a woman.
Every woman has realized at some point in her life that she is a dumping ground for male emotions. A lot of men can’t open up to each other without social punishment, so women become the default for such things. Whether she is a friend or a romantic partner or even just a random passerby, every single one is transformed from a person to a receptacle, both by herself and by the men around her. As he continued to treat me like an object, I found myself objectifying myself as well as I reverted to playing that role. I played the role because I felt empathy for him and I didn’t know how else to show it.
I can’t even be mad at men for it. Despite centuries of socialization to be strong and stoic, men are who they are underneath, just as despite the socialization I endured in a fundamentalist Christian household, I was who I was underneath it—-strong-willed, masculine-natured, and mentally ill. Punishing someone for being human does not stop them from being human, it just makes them better at hiding the undesirable qualities of that humanness from unsafe people. As a result, men are just as emotional as women (because both have the same human brain), but it isn’t obvious. They are fulfilling their gender role, just as I fulfilled my gender role of keeping myself sweet and small instead of demanding the space I deserved with my coworker.
I stopped being that way with him after that “perfect woman” comment, though. I kept conversations to one word responses on my end. It wasn’t confusing to him as to why, since I’d told him he’d been making me uncomfortable with his continued micro-advances. He brushed me off initially, but as he started to realize I was serious about maintaining emotional distance, he began to lash out in little ways. Namely, he would interrupt conversations with my other coworkers. If I pretended not to hear him, he would yell my deadname at me until I paid attention.
That’s not the first time that’s happened. Many men have used my deadname against me when I started standing up for myself. It’s another way I can be easily dehumanized or have my agency thwarted, to call me by my hyper-feminine deadname that literally means “damsel in distress” instead of my current masculine-coded name, which means “protector”. Despite my best efforts, I was still a receptacle to him, but now for his anger and violence. That’s the frustrating part about all of it. Even if a woman tries to break out of her role to be seen as human, she will find herself harshly reassigned to objectification under a different action—an action that may not be as gentle as the one before it. Some may find sexually explicit rumors or photos being spread. Some may get threatened. Some may get hit. Some may get stalked. And for the unluckiest of us, some may get sexually assaulted.
All of the above have happened to me in retaliation to rejecting a man at various points in my life from childhood to now. What they all share in common is that I was simply being put back in my place by becoming a receptacle for violence. Doesn’t matter what type of violence as long as I’m still just a receptacle.
There’s no winning. If I give him what he wants, I give up my self for the woman’s role and his role. If I step outside of it, I get smacked down, re-objectified under a different category: as a bitch.
Anyway, he eventually left about a month later. He wasn’t even that good of a custodian.
While my car was in the shop, my partner surprised me with a trip to, and I quote: “a cabin at the top of Amicalola Falls.” I packed and prepared for the half mile to the top of the falls that I had done many times, before finding out on the way that what my partner actually meant by a “cabin at Amicalola” was a five mile trek to spend a night at, and I quote again: “the Len Foote Inn” (which I heard as “the Le Fou Inn” at first). Luckily, I googled it and realized he actually meant Hike Inn, a small lodge in the middle of nowhere that is accessible to guests only via a semi-challenging five mile hike through the wilderness. While I was underprepared for the longer, more difficult hike it required, I wasn’t going to turn down a shot at such a cool experience. And so we set out on Friday.
We started the hike around 9 AM and hoped to arrive around noon. Unfortunately, we had to let go of that goal early on as the weather swung between light drizzle and all-out downpour, forcing us to pause and fidget with our various ponchos and bag covers. We had several trial periods of deciding if we wanted to be hot but dry (wearing a rain jacket), or cool but wet (not wearing a rain jacket). Even once we managed to get our gear and clothes under control, the weather impacted our speed on the slippery roots and rocks. Finally, after the first mile, we fell into the rhythm that all hikers start to feel after trudging long enough uninterrupted.
I get asked what I entertain myself with during long hikes sometimes. The underwhelming answer is that, if I’m focused, most of my attention on looking at the path, plotting my footing through all the trip hazards that nature puts there. With the bad weather, it was especially important to stare at the ground, so I wasn’t looking up to spot them when my partner did.
“Cubs,” he said.
I looked up without waiting for a command from my brain. Sure enough, three fuzzy problems stared back at me from the path, next to a big tree, with no mama in sight.
We immediately backed away until the mist and green summer foliage obscured them, then kept going, eventually putting a satisfactory fifty feet of distance between us and them. We stopped there to plan out how we were going to get to Hike Inn with an enemy spawn point in our way.
As I turned to face my partner, my eyes instead fell on the black shape behind him.
She stood about thirty-five feet away from us, but even at that distance she was the largest black bear I have ever seen. Had she stood on her hind legs, she would’ve towered at least a foot and a half over my 5’11 partner. The size alone made me feel like if she did choose violence, she could win. Here we were, standing between her and her cubs, and she was looking right at us. However, instead of aggroing, she ran across the path and into the woods to my right. I put up my pointer finger and kept it on her shadow through the foliage. If she got bigger than she was when I first put my finger up then she was getting closer, but if she got smaller, she was getting further away. I tracked her path for 7 seconds until her large frame became obscured by the thick greenery. She had neither gotten further away nore closer. She was circling. Unsure of what that meant, I began to gather rocks. Even if she was running from us, it couldn’t hurt.
Just as I began shoving a rock into my partner’s hands, a sudden sound made us freeze. Indiscernible noises were getting louder from further down the path. As we strained to listen, they took the shape of human voices. I don’t like to run into people on hiking trails, but this is the one and only time I was overjoyed to see a large, loud, high-spirited group heading towards us. We quickly made our way to them.
The first thing we said to them was the critical information, that there were cubs ahead and the mother had just run off the path nearby. They were a bit stunned by us initially as we had run up to them so intensely, but as I searched their body language for a sense of friendliness, a hint that they would at least be willing to walk with us for safety, I noticed one of the men stood in a familiar way. I squinted at his face under his big brimmed hat. With my wild, wet hair and out of my work uniform he didn’t immediately realize who I was, but after a moment of staring, we suddenly started freaking out and hugging. It was my cafeteria lunch buddy, the psychology professor from my university! It was an insane coincidence to have run into such a crazy wildlife encounter and then run into such luck right after. As our group traversed up the rest of the path together, now a population of six that had no need to be afraid of the bears as we talked lively with each other, I looked to the tree my partner and I had tried to pass and the cubs were nowhere in sight. No bears harmed, no cubs traumatized, no humans hurt. Everyone won at the end of the day.
We weren’t on the Appalachian Trail, but I suppose we were close enough to it that the trail magic found its way to us.
There were a LOT of different kinds of mushrooms on this hike. I regret I couldn’t stop to take more photos of them. This is Chicken of the Woods and it is edible.
When we live the same day over and over again, we build a type of muscle memory in our heads. Days and months used to feel so long when you were a kid because—-to varying degrees—-everything was new, even in your day-to-day. Your brain was listening in harder. Now we are older. The months fly by and soon it’s been a year. The familiarity of normal life and predictability of daily routine make the details blur together in our memories, giving the illusion that time itself is moving faster than it did before.
Part of the reason why I like hiking and camping so much is because it disrupts this blur a bit. Even when you have been doing it for a long time (21 years in my case) or are returning to familiar spots, every time remains feeling like more of a journey than a routine. It’s a largely uncontrolled environment where the probability for unknown increases. You’re using skills that aren’t used in the everyday, making choices you don’t routinely make, and when you aren’t doing that you have to get along with being bored. It’s the perfect setting to make ones brain listen in more to what is going on around them, to break up the monotony that modern life brings.
Time slowed during the trek as usual, but the thing I enjoyed the most about Hike Inn is that time stayed slow while I was there.
I didn’t have enough phone signal to access the internet. I am not much of a chronic scroller, so it was more of an easily forgotten annoyance than a stressful realization. However, after a while of experiencing the lack of phone, I realized I had taken off an invisible burden by becoming unreachable; the bandwidth that the need to respond was taking up in my head was not only revealed, but fully shut down during my short time at Hike Inn. I tried to pass the time by drawing, journaling, attending a lecture, going out to take photos, watching nature, chatting with people, talking deeply with my partner…but when I would check the time, only twenty minutes had passed doing it all. More often than not, the days don’t feel long enough for me to do everything. It was nice to feel them take too long to finish, for once.
(Except when I was waiting for dinner to be served, of course.)
Over the course of a single weekend, I went to see two horror movies with some friends. For those of you who don’t know, I want to write horror books one day, and seeing the horror genre as a whole being taken seriously by large audiences today is probably the most exciting thing happening in my life right now.
The Backrooms
Favorite movie poster where it looks like someone’s getting done from behind…
First, I saw The Backrooms.
To preface, I was very familiar with the concept of the backrooms before the movie was even a twinkle in A24’s eye. I have seen the 4chan post.
This is widely cited as the first idea of the backrooms concept, appearing on 4chan in 2019. However, I have found unconfirmed reports from other 4chan users that the idea existed as far back as 2008. The image has been traced back to a blog in 2003 documenting the renovation of a HobbyTown in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. The internet loves weird liminal stuff like this and ran with it.
I had seen the very popular YouTube series by Kane Pixels (Kane Parsons), who is not the creator of the concept (and never claimed to be), only one whose specific version of it got extremely popular. At only 16 years old in 2022, he created the very first backrooms video in Blender.
If you are interested, here are all of his created videos in chronological order:
Upon watching these, you will get the feeling that the backrooms isn’t really a blatant horror, more of a vibe horror, if such a thing exists. The atmosphere is what drives the concept.
So upon seeing that A24 was making this movie, I was hesitant and worried about a bad cash grab. It’s not that A24 is neccisarily known for that, but a production studio could very easily toss out the vibes and turn it into an action survival horror with a million creepy entities being thrown at some lost, scared-yet-lucky-and-infallible Async scientist. But I’m so glad it wasn’t that.
So in order to get into it, let’s return to the familiar layout of my internet-friendly, millennial-beloved list. Buzzfeed has competition when I’m at the keyboard. Spoilers ahead.
The Backrooms: Direction of the Script
I like that it followed ordinary people and their experiences discovering what is essentially another dimension instead of following the company and it’s attempts at probing around in it. Not only did it make it easy to connect to them as I am also an ordinary person, it also made it easier to be terrified. Async, the company, knows there are entities in the backrooms; normal people stumbling around in there have no idea what they’ve gotten themselves into.
I also like that Kane Parsons, the director of the movie and creator of this specific lore chain of the backrooms, decided to make the movie accessible to people who didn’t see his YouTube series. You really didn’t need to know anything before going in. In fact, there were things in the movie that weren’t in the YouTube series and made the world more interesting to an outsider. I think this is a big factor in the success of this movie. Despite making it accessible and the addition of new material, it did not lose the “feel” of the backrooms, which like I mentioned before is a large part of the driving factor of the horror.
The Backrooms: The New Lore
Two things have been added:
The still-life replicas. The non-souled, poorly copied people who are made of…uh, the stuff you can eat.
The Captain Clark entity
There really was nothing like that before in Kane Parsons’ lore. However, their inclusion is truly what makes the movie a good study of the characters we follow.
The Backrooms: The Characters
This might be my personal bias peeking through, but it’s my review so I’m gonna let it shine. I loved Dr. Mary Kline (portrayed by Renate Reinsve). I have struggled with much of the same feelings that Mary seems to have as an adult. It was something I resonated with deeply. I saw in her a feeling of failure for not saving her mother, a feeling that compels her to become a therapist (a path I also considered for myself). I saw that feeling drive her to try to save Clark, a character who is unwilling to believe anything is wrong with him. Her attempts to save him lead to her becoming trapped in the backrooms with him, now being victimized by his lack of desire to change and leads to the realization that she cannot save anyone who doesn’t want to be saved. Then, she is trapped in a battle with Clark’s “dark side”, the entity named Captain Clark. She takes the concrete handprint from her childhood home, the place that kept her trapped all those years, the physical representation of the feelings she carries with her, and dashes it to pieces against his face, signifying her freedom from those feelings and leading to her successful escape…
…only for Async to trap her all over again. Not because she did anything wrong, they just can’t let someone who has seen that much of their secret project back into the public. Nothing personal.
Clark (portrayed by Chiwetel Ejiofor) has been facing some controversy as a character. Clark is a black man who is implied to be an abusive alcoholic to his white wife, and attacks his white female therapist. I am not black, so take everything I have to say about this with a grain of salt. I personally believe nothing would have changed had he been portrayed by any other race, and despite his flaws, he is not a totally unsympathetic character. He vocalizes a lot of interesting concepts about the obligation to change and what being trapped in a cycle can look like. He isn’t an abusive alcoholic and therapist-attacker because he’s black; he’s like that because he’s struggling with feelings of being undervalued. A lot of the way he acts out is due to his desire to be understood as he is and validated, and turning to anger when he doesn’t find what he’s looking for. It’s why he attaches himself to Captain Clark, the entity representing his repressed psyche. It’s why he finds a “home” in the backrooms, surrounded by people who aren’t ensouled and can’t be hurt by him, letting him do whatever he wants and being unable to react like real people. He’s free to consume others much the way he does in the real world, to take as much as he wants from them without them fighting back. The backrooms is a place that lets him be who he is. It doesn’t demand that he change like his wife and therapist do, it doesn’t require that he admit any wrongdoing, and thus he can give up on his self-improvement journey.
But refusing change and continuing the cycle will lead to a form of, let’s say…self-consumption.
With that said, he’s also a black character who dies, but again, I personally believe he would’ve died the same way if he was any other race, because the death is a response to the decisions he makes as a character as I have explained here. I personally believe they simply casted the best actor for the role, and the best one was Chiwetel Ejiofor. And they were right about that decision. He was great and I hope to see him in more stuff in the future.
Cycles is a major theme of this movie, and both of these characters are trapped in ones which effectively leave them in the same place they started, or result in their outright self-destruction.
I also want to add that Robert Bobroczkyi has my dream job as a creature actor. I am unfortunately very ordinary looking, but maybe I’ll end up in a horrific freak accident some day.
Obsession (2025)
I will likely write a second review in the future for this movie. After only seeing it once, I’m of the belief that it is the kind of movie that requires multiple showings to really settle in fully, especially given how complex Inde Navarrette’s acting is. Just rewatching a few of the scenes from YouTube had me picking up on things I missed in the theater. Take most of what I say in this review as somewhat underbaked.
When I first heard of this movie, it was not popular yet. I had heard of the monkey’s paw trope but had yet to see a recent horror movie really do well with it (remember “Wish Upon”?). But watching the trailer, I could just sense something was different about this one. I couldn’t even tell you what it was, but I wasn’t the only one who felt it because that very week the movie EXPLODED in popularity. And then I absolutely had to see it.
Obsession: What Makes It Better Than All The Others
Firstly, there is no room to breathe. The tension is maintained incredibly well throughout. When Freaky Nikki isn’t around, you’re searching the corners of the screen praying she won’t show up. When she is present, you’re tearing out your hair wondering what she’s going to do next. She harms herself in brutal ways, harms others in even more brutal ways, and when she’s not doing either of those things, creates an atmosphere of visceral social discomfort. All of it fills you with persistent dread. There is never a moment to relax.
Secondly, I theorize that the real driving factor behind this movie isn’t the entity that takes over Nikki’s body. It isn’t the way it acts, it isn’t the way it moves, and it isn’t even Bear being an idiot. It’s something very normal, something we’re all guilty of: lack of communication. The refusal to be sincere is what drives the plot forward. Ian deceives Bear by telling him to not tell Nikki his feelings because he is hiding that he wants to keep sleeping with Nikki. Bear follows through and deceives Nikki by not telling her his feelings. Bear deceives others by claiming “Nikki” is okay when she’s very clearly not. The only ones who are really honest about anything is Nikki and Sarah, who get dragged into things all the same. By the time anyone is honest about anything, like when Bear finally starts asking for help, nobody believes each other and the consequences cannot be undone.
Obsession: Is Bear Bad?
Nintey percent of the discourse surrounding this movie has been focused on the way Bear rips away Nikki’s autonomy by making the wish. I don’t think he’s the villain for making the wish in the first place. It’s a novelty item, who would expect it to work? Even people on the fake version of Reddit the movie shows had mixed reviews on if it works or not. Plus, she’s not really acting all that strange aside from a few blips where real Nikki is breaking through. It hardly compares to what happens later.
When Bear gets that phone call from Ian at the restaurant, telling him that Nikki didn’t actually like him and that she is also lying about her dad having cancer (as an explanation for her strange behavior), he should’ve realized immediately that the Nikki before him is not the real Nikki. It is of my opinion that right there, he puts two and two together and realizes that the One Wish Willow worked. Instead of taking a moment to process any of this, especially after her strange outburst in the restaurants, it hard cuts to them having sex. If we’re giving him credit, he may not realize yet that real Nikki’s consciousness is still in the body and is aware of what is happening, but it’s still a strange decision on his part. This is where I started becoming more critical of him as a character. It showed that he was willing to ignore a lot of red flags about her psychological state to keep his idea of a perfect relationship going.
In my opinion, he seeks help far too late. Yes, I know that there’s no way to cancel the wish, but why wasn’t he calling that number sooner? Like, maybe right after the restaurant and not when she fed him his dead cat? Why did it have to escalate that far? Even when he does call the number and discovers that real Nikki is suffering, his focus still seems mostly on containing Freaky Nikki’s behavior.
When real Nikki finally is able to communicate with Bear while Freaky Nikki sleeps, his response to her begging to die is: “What’s so bad about being with me?” I rolled my eyes in the theater. Her response, “I’ve never been with you, Bear,” is a line that’s supposed to punch you in the gut. This woman has not had any control over what’s happened to her. And then, instead of reassuring Nikki that he’s trying to find a solution, that he’s sorry for what he’s done to her, literally anything he should be saying…he walks away to meet Sarah, somehow not considering that if Freaky Nikki wakes up and finds him alone in a car at 3 AM with another woman, it likely won’t go well. And it doesn’t, as Sarah is killed.
Only after someone dies does he finally kick it into gear and start reaching out for actual help. He goes to the shopkeeper who sells the One Wish Willows, then his friend Ian trying to get him to wish that Bear never made the wish. Ian thinks he’s avoiding the truth instead of being honest about what’s really going on with Nikki and the true nature of their relationship, so he jokingly asks for a billion dollars and wastes his wish. Bear, doomed, returns to his home where Nikki waits.
As stated on the call with the One Wish Willow representative, the only thing that can free Nikki is Bear’s death, and he walks it back twice despite two of his friends being dead at this point…until Freaky Nikki finds the extra One Wish Willow and wishes that Bear would love her the same way she does, which distracts him from throwing up the pills, inadvertently saving real Nikki’s life as he dies and she snaps back into control. The final girl, who we weirdly see very little of the entire movie, and whose life is likely entirely destroyed after by actions she didn’t do and didn’t want, and who was the only person who didn’t stop fighting the intruder in her mind.
In conclusion, I do think Bear is a selfish character. A part of me suspects that if Freaky Nikki was acting normal and he became aware that real Nikki was a trapped, non-consenting consciousness, he would’ve kept things the way they were against real Nikki’s will. He dragged his feet getting help until Sarah died. His responses to the few chances he gets to talk to real Nikki and say something meaningful are wasted on his own hurt feelings. He doesn’t seem to be thinking of her very much, despite her suffering. It is kind of cathartic at the end of the movie seeing his free will become ripped away as hers has, making him unable to prevent his own death.
Obsession:How It Resonates With A Generation
As I’ve struggled more than usual to write this review, I realized I can’t quite analyze this movie without analyzing the culture to which it’s being presented. That’s been why this review is so hard, because I’m searching for stuff in the material itself instead of looking at my own feelings as a young person, and the feelings of the young people around me. So I’m going to do that now.
I feel that for young, Gen Z women, Obsession explores some of their most poignant dating anxieties. I will be first in line to say that I have found myself scared of friendzoning men or turning down their interest in me due to the potential of how they could react. Anyone who has followed my Facebook since 2020 will know that I’ve dealt with a friendzoned stalker who would trick me into believing he was different people online. Sometimes if someone feels that you’ve thwarted their power, they’ll try to take it back by force.
Also, Nikki is someone with ambitions. She wants to write. She is already working on a book. She’s trying to move forward with her life by quitting her job at the dead end music store that Bear, Sarah, and Ian also work at and going off to pursue her goals. There’s a fear as a woman of getting stuck in the same town, working the same job, with the same routine, the same friends, because of the same boyfriend keeping you there. You give up your hopeful life for a man who refuses to have ambition himself and, therefore, ruins your potential as well. Kind of like being cursed, as that is essentially what happens to Nikki when Bear makes the wish. Everything she wanted to do suddenly disappeared the moment that willow branch snapped. The same thing happens to Sarah, in a way. Because of Bear’s lack of proactiveness, she dies never even knowing that she was accepted into art school, erasing her ambitions right in front of us.
There’s a hint about the loneliness and anxieties that men feel, too. Bear is living alone in his late grandmother’s house. He seems very alone. Then, his cat dies, and it seems to really bother him. While his friends do offer their condolences, he seems hesitant to talk too much about it or reflect on how an obvious emotional support in his life has been taken out. With that in context, it is understandable that he’d feel sensitive to Nikki’s potential rejection. While it doesn’t excuse his actions later on, Bear seems to need more support than he’s getting, support someone like a girlfriend could provide.
I feel like Obsession touches on these themes. I don’t think it necessarily explores them in-depth, but I think that even at the mention of them we’re easily able to project these fears we have onto the characters and plot. That’s why it’s so loved. That’s why it’s so good. What is a good horror movie if we can’t project our fear onto it?
