Backrooms' Weird Caveman, Explained (And How It Ties to… Aliens?)
It’s safe to say that the mysteries to unravel in Kane Parsons’ debut feature film, Backrooms, will leave you scratching your head (in a good way) for days after you watch it.
Viewers have been trying to understand the concept itself since the original Backrooms short (and subsequent web series) dropped online in 2022, and Parsons has now expanded the lore that he helped develop even further in his 2026 film.
There is so much to investigate and ponder when it comes to Backrooms. What the hell is Pirate Clark? Could the Backrooms world actually be real? What is that caveman cardboard cut-out saying? It's the latter mystery that we're going to dive into here. And as you'd expect, to do so, we'll need to go into spoiler territory to do so.
What Is The Backrooms 'Caveman'?
When Clark first enters the titular liminal space of winding corridors and eerily small doors, he sees (and hears) a cardboard cut-out of a caveman. It has a tape recorder attached to its back, which is playing a strange, looped audio that is initially pretty hard to discern.
However, if you listen more closely, you can figure out it’s actually a recording of people saying 'hello' in different languages from across the world. If you’re a nerd for space exploration, you’ll know this is the Voyager Golden Record, an audio recording NASA put onto vinyl and sent into the universe in the hopes that extraterrestrial life would find it and understand our world a little better.
The recording, titled ‘Welcome in 55 Languages’, is a way to interact with alien lifeforms and let them know we come in peace. But what is it doing in the Backrooms?
Why Is The Recording Playing In The Backrooms?
By the time we get to the ending of Backrooms, we learn that a company called ASYNC has been studying the maze-like phenomenon for some time. The research institute used to manufacture MRI machines, but working out what’s going on in the Backrooms naturally took precedence upon discovery.
The entity scouring the endless space, looking for people, objects, and, perhaps, even emotions and memories to replicate and distort into its own twisted vision of reality, is something we still don’t really understand.
There’s definitely scope for a Backrooms sequel if Parsons and A24 want to delve deeper into the origins and machinations of the monster, but one thing’s for sure: it is not human. In fact, it’s a lot like the alien from Annihilation that inhabits the shimmer and quite literally transforms into the beings it encounters.
Whatever the entity in Backrooms is, we might assume that ASYNC were inspired by NASA’s idea and left that audio broadcast playing in the Backrooms as a way to initiate communication with the unidentified creature.
Judging by the way the entity smashes up the cardboard cut-out and feasts on its victims, it either didn’t understand the peaceful message or simply didn’t care.
Project Hail Mary Used A Similar Concept
The fact that ASYNC used a caveman to represent mankind is interesting in itself – was it trying to disarm the creature by showing it a less-evolved version of humans? Was it supposed to evoke the idea of enlightenment and how connection with the entity might take the human race forward into a new era? Perhaps.
Coincidentally, there is another film from this year which also used the Voyager recording as inspiration. In Project Hail Mary, Ryan Gosling’s character, Ryland Grace, notices golden plaques on board his spaceship. Etched into the plaques are illustrations of the evolution of man, which, of course, includes cavemen. Thankfully for Grace, he encounters a lovable alien like Rocky, but Clark and the Backrooms characters weren’t as fortunate.
Instead, just like in The Fantastic 4: First Steps, the interspecies message is a foreboding precursor for an attack. In the Marvel movie, it works the other way, though, with Reed Richards and Johnny Storm trying to decipher the mysterious transmission – captured on golden vinyl, no less – from outer space, which turns out to be the native language of the Silver Surfer.
Hollywood has long used NASA's experiments and exploits to influence works of science fiction (and many, many biopics). It seems that the relationship between man and outer space is flourishing once more in the modern filmmaking climate.
