What are you afraid of? A ghost lurking in the dark corner of a room? An unholy, monstrous creature? An enigmatic serial killer? Our fears are turned into devices that horror filmmakers leverage to generate a reaction from us, leading to the enduring popularity of subgenres such as the haunted house, the creature feature and the slasher. A horror film can wriggle its way deeper under your skin when it finds a less overt source for its scares. How about a space? One that feels strangely familiar, yet is impossible and eerily empty? What if you were to discover this place accidentally and get lost with no way out?
It all started with a single image. An empty office-like space. Yellow wallpaper. Fluorescent lights. Worn carpet. Posted anonymously on 4chan in 2019, it was accompanied by a caption that dubbed this place “the Backrooms”, somewhere outside of reality that you might “noclip” into (a gaming term for when you pass through an apparently solid wall into an area that the game designers didn’t intend for you to access) and get trapped, consisting of nothing but endless, empty rooms.
The eeriness of the image, veiled by its mundanity, sparked an online obsession with so-called liminal spaces. Transitional and transitory, they connect one place or time with another. People began posting photos of corridors, staircases, stations, car parks, often dingy and, crucially, always empty. Our attention is unnaturally directed to the architecture normally meant to go unnoticed in places we are accustomed to passing through. When a space has a function to be filled and traversed by people, and you remove any sign of the human figure, it can be unsettling. Liminal spaces exist between the familiar and the unfamiliar, and evoke an uncanny feeling to which we’re inexorably drawn. Suspended in time, they offer a glimpse into a different reality.
A universal unease catapulted the backrooms into a digital urban legend, a campfire ghost story in the internet age known as a creepypasta, inspiring cross-media retellings. One such interpretation was a 9-minute found-footage YouTube short film by then-16-year-old Kane Parsons. Developing it into a viral series, he caught the attention of A24, who sought a feature film adaptation, etching Parsons into the record books as the youngest director to helm a production of this scale.
Backrooms’ unconventional path to the cinema is one that has been paved recently, in the era of social media. Kane Parsons joins an assortment of YouTubers who have transitioned to Hollywood and found success, especially in the horror space. The Philippou brothers have directed two acclaimed, intensely freaky features in Talk to Me and Bring Her Back; Markiplier’s self-financed Iron Lung made $50 million with no marketing earlier this year; and Curry Barker’s Obsession has become a sensation, seizing the attention of an entire generation and, having gone toe-to-toe with a new Star Wars blockbuster, is set to gross over $300 million from a budget of $750,000, making it one of the most profitable films in history.
Backrooms heralds the emergence of a new subgenre: liminal horror. This is not to suggest that it didn’t exist already, but that we now have a label with which to identify it. It could be felt in the winding, architectural impossibilities of the hallways of the Overlook Hotel, or in the disorientation of the expansive corridors of the Nostromo as it travels through the void of outer space, or in the mucky, decrepit obscurity of the Zone through which a Stalker guides you to reach a room that grants desires.
The meeting of psychology and architecture in the backrooms is reflected in the film’s two protagonists. Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Clark is a failed architect, struggling with alcoholism and a divorce, and his therapist, Mary (Renate Reinsve), utilises role-play to venture into his mind and unearth the root of his depression. He can only attribute the lonely mess he finds himself in to the way that he’s wired. Stuck running a Persian-pirate-hybrid-themed furniture store with a noticeable lack of customers, he records TV ads dressed as Captain Clark, delivering his best pirate speak in an effort to appeal to the consumerism of the 1990s setting. One night, when sleeping in the store, Clark discovers a curious glow in the wall in the basement. As he approaches, he inexplicably passes through and enters the backrooms.
For his YouTube series, Kane Parsons created the backrooms himself in Blender. At 20 years old, with the resources of a studio like A24, he’s been granted access to a $10m playground, with real, gargantuan sets (they constructed over 30,000 square feet of corridors and rooms) and talented actors, making the exploration of these spaces dizzyingly immersive. The daunting, boundless possibility conveyed by the backrooms is matched by the staggering scale of the production design, bringing this unreality to life. The film peaks during a found-footage segment when we’re thrust deeper and deeper into the backrooms, and the layouts become increasingly bizarre and decreasingly logical.
Parsons is interested in the backrooms as a representation of a collective subconscious. It’s a place for things half-remembered, half-forgotten. The imperfection and opacity of memory are made physical. Mundane objects that would often blend into their surroundings are literally fused to the floor or ceiling, half-formed. Rooms shift and merge without sense, like dreams. We don’t always think about the footprint we leave behind, how much stuff we produce, buy, use, and subsequently discard, and the countless spaces we construct for intermittent use. The modern world has become a labyrinth, with a widespread fear that the chaotic façade only conceals an underlying emptiness.
Personal projections may fill the void. As Clark goes deeper into the backrooms, he feels as if he’s found a place that offers the possibility, creativity and freedom of the life he’s dreamt of but couldn’t attain. Are they, however, simply the physical manifestation of his alienation and frustration from his inability to connect with others? A reprise of Clark and Mary’s therapy session from earlier in the film cleverly reveals how easy it is to feel or become psychologically trapped.
It’s hard to separate the backrooms from their internet origins, even in a feature film made for the big screen. The bewildering network of rooms reflects the digital world that now surrounds us and has invaded every area of our lives. You don’t have to wander far into Kane Parsons’ imagining of the backrooms to discern that he grew up playing video games (Portal 2 is one of his primary cited influences). The distorted objects and impossible architecture are reminiscent of visual glitches and poorly designed environments in games. It’s also too easy to think of generative AI in relation to the warped, uncanny way that the backrooms replicate our reality.
The concept of the backrooms cannot be attributed to the mind of a single creator. As a piece of cultural mythology, it feels like an autonomous entity, a shared nightmare. The essence of its unsettling power may precede this film, but that only adds to its impact in a way. Parsons deserves credit for wrestling the beast with admirable control and restraint. He embraces creativity and succeeds in sustaining an eerie atmosphere without relying on cheap scares. Liminal spaces such as the backrooms are most effective when shrouded in ambiguity, which Parsons does well not to dispel with neat answers. Despite his youth, he can handle a large-scale production. Because of his youth, he can offer a fresh, appropriately modern perspective, capturing the alienation of a generation. Most impressively, he proves that the liminal and the uncanny can be cinematic.
CineLiterate 