Exploration of an abandoned Texas Mall

September 11, 2024 8:02 AM

VFX artist KanePixels, creator of the breakout video series set in The Backrooms, has finished their latest project: The Oldest View (Youtube playlist).

The Oldest View is a six video series about the discovery and exploration of an abandoned Texas Mall. It brings his trademark sense of place, pacing, tension and the uncanny to a new setting.

Once you're done, you might be interested to see the real-life inspiration that KanePixels meticulously recreated: The Valley View Center Mall courtesy of zeroxlulu.

If endless memes, low effort also-ran videos, shovelware games and fractal wikis haven't killed your interest in that right-angled yellow labyrinth A-Sync Research is probably the foremost follower in KanePixels' footsteps, with their own high-quality backrooms series.

The Backrooms, previously.

posted by Lorc (6 comments total)

I grew up in DFW and went to Valley View a lot growing up! I stumbled upon the Rolling Giant video way too late at night, and I was struck by this profoundly disquieting sense of familiarity. Sure enough, I looked it up and it was Valley View!
posted by Krazor at 8:17 AM on September 11 [1 favorite]

The Backrooms definitely wasn't perfect, but it's also the work of a (I believe) very young creator, and it has a definite sense of menace and strong use of the medium of relatively short videos chaining together to tell a more complicated story with multiple PoVs. I'm excoted to check out a new effort!
posted by GenjiandProust at 8:23 AM on September 11

Don't click if you prefer going in completely cold, but I found helpful context for the videos here. There's more going on Kane's videos here than I, who knew nothing of any of that, initially cottoned on to.

Thanks for the post, I really enjoyed these.
posted by german_bight at 2:53 PM on September 11

an old review i wrote after the last renovation
posted by graywyvern at 3:34 PM on September 11

One pretty reasonable argument against the whole liminal-space horror aesthetic is that mostly the spaces described are just service corridors or worksites-after-hours and warehouses-on-Sunday, and that the true horror at the heart of so much of the genre’s boogeymen boils down to “what if you had to have a real job”. But this deeply-buried dead mall excursion is really excellent.

I’d love to see the raw materials he’s used to make this, and the process. Looking over the reference material, it all looks like a very well-done and well-loved homage.
posted by mhoye at 7:52 AM on September 12

The Backrooms definitely wasn't perfect, but it's also the work of a (I believe) very young creator,

Having now had the chance to sit with this all the way through, I want to talk about true this is, but mostly I want to talk about how much more whole, I guess, this effort is. It's a lot more varied, patient and willing to dwell on its subject through this combination of created, historical and new present-day footage. Kane is willing to just let the story tell itself and breathe, outside of the VFX quasi-horror and end on so much ambivalence and seeming incompleteness, it's just so well done.

Back in one of the links in the thread about Yunchan Lim's incredible playing of Rachmaninnofs's 3rd Concerto, some of the expert commentary described his play as "a young master at work", and that phrase came to me as I was watching this. It's a whole different field, obviously, but there's both an incredible technical acumen (the foley work, incredible) here, as well as a patience and maturity in this that is surprising.
posted by mhoye at 12:46 PM on September 12 [1 favorite]