Lamplight Drivel

I'm encouraged that a film like this year's BACKROOMS could become such a runaway box office smash.  Granted, it's arguably in that contemporary genre of "elevated horror", more concerned with psychology than gore effects.  Younger folks these days seem to favor this brand of terror.  The big hits in the horror genre in my formative years involved serial killers who employed creative methods of dispatch.  Mostly brain dead thrillers with inane dialogue and gratuitous nude shots.  For every film like  THE SHINING there were a few dozen THE BURNINGs or SILENT SCREAMs.  Campy fun, but crap.  BACKROOMS is neither. Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) faces a dismal life as owner of a discount furniture store, the kind where employees don silly costumes in the commercials.  We learn that his career as an architect stalled and his marriage failed.  Enough trauma to necessitate visits to a therapist named Mary (Renate Reinsve) who suffers her own crippli...