Backrooms’ Mural, Explained: 6 Clues and Secrets You Probably Missed

Kane Parsons’ Backrooms is the indie horror movie that has captured both the minds and wallets of cinema-goers everywhere – even giving one iconic space juggernaut a Kessel run for its credits.

Based on a relatively new slice of Internet urban legend, the feature-length expansion of Parsons’ own online contributions to the extra-dimensional lore (as Kane Pixels) warrants multiple viewings and plenty of subsequent sleuthing to make heads or tails of the winding hallways and architecturally unhinged rooms.

As well as the true nature of ‘Pirate Clark’ and what that weird caveman cut-out is doing in there, one of the most tantalising things to examine is the mural. It’s all too briefly glimpsed when Mary stumbles across it at the start of the film’s final act, and even if you do get a chance to look at its finer details, few of them make much sense… at least, at first.

Murals have featured in other pieces of Backrooms media, and some of the elements – such as the clear portrait of a Pirate Clark at the centre and the hazmat-suited ASYNC employees – are too obvious to need explaining. Here, and with plenty of spoilers included, I’m going to collect the various fan theories, as well as offer my own ideas on the more hidden aspects of the Backrooms mural that might help us better understand Clark and the liminal space itself.  

Who Painted the Backrooms Mural?

Like many of you, I didn’t question that Clark could be the only one to have painted the mural when I first saw it. His architectural background, scribbled shapes of imaginative buildings when bored at work, and his attempt at a Backrooms floorplan make him the obvious candidate. Aside from the ASYNC explorers in the hazmat suits (likely worn to shield them from the space’s possible electromagnetic effects), he’s also the only one we know is actively investigating and mapping the dimension.

However, some fans theorise the creator is actually Pirate Clark, the Backrooms-generated, monstrous version of him in his Cap’n Clark costume. Part of this stems from the height the mural reaches, coupled with there being no sight of a ladder that could help the real Clark paint that high. This theory adds that the mural is also far messier than Clark’s neater pen sketches. 

Another piece of evidence is the text reading: “The floor plan changed again… Roof is wrong, roof is wrong… I don’t know who signed the plans… But the handwriting looks like mine.” This identity crisis could be attributed to Pirate Clark, whom the Backrooms ‘remembered’ just as the real Clark entered the space feeling totally disenfranchised with his life and increasingly delusional. Another piece of writing, imploring: “Why think in terms of magic?? Be REALISTIC!!!” could similarly be Pirate Clark voicing his original’s refusal to think beyond himself and his own stilted worldview.     

Others have countered the theory that Pirate Clark is the mural’s creator by pointing out the floor fan in the right-hand corner – something that only a flesh-and-blood human would need, not a lumbering, inhuman entity. 

While I find the theory interesting, I think it’s far too straw-grasping to be a solid explanation. There’s no indication offered by the film that Pirate Clark can even speak, let alone hold a paintbrush and write coherently. This is compounded by the other human-like entities in the Backrooms acting like lobotomised husks. Furthermore, while the mural is less consistent with the artwork Clark sketches earlier in the film, it’s still reasonably legible and therefore not hard to believe it’s still his handiwork. Plus, the actions he takes following the mural’s reveal are hardly those of a sane man. 

The mural provides plenty to pick over in terms of Clark’s interpretations of the Backrooms and how he sees himself within the space, but more than anything, it’s a clear visual representation of how much Clark’s mind has unravelled from when we last saw him. While Backrooms is deliberately knotty and ambiguous, in this case, the Occam’s razor principle should apply. As for the ‘missing’ ladder, it could have simply been removed by Clark when it was no longer needed (we see him moving furniture around before), or it’s just something the filmmakers may have neglected to consider.

The Mural Explains How Time Works in the Backrooms

In the bottom left corner, there’s an image that looks like a calendar, as well as the phrase “Here and now is a two-way street.” We know Clark has a ‘base camp’ set up in the basement of his furniture warehouse outside of the tape door he made to the Backrooms, and, at least before poor Kat and Bobby’s unfortunate deaths inside, he’s been going back and forth between the Backrooms and our world.

In the real world, the film takes place across a few days between June 29 and early July 1990. However, it’s very likely that in the Backrooms, time works differently – perhaps not at all. These two details indicate that Clark has been tracking this difference, and he concludes that moving between these two dimensions collapses one’s sense of the present, enhancing his loosening grip on reality.

Clark could also be taking 'the window within', the core allegory of Mary’s therapeutic method, too much to heart. After all, the voicemail he leaves informs her that he "opened” the window, and he's "not coming back". Windows are, of course, two-way partitions between the outside and inside. A mirror of this concept crops up when Kat and Clark find themselves on either side of what appears to be a solid wall. Kat claims she can see Clark through it, but he can’t see her. Ultimately, she ends up dead, seemingly, in part, because he was unable to help her (he tells Mary he tried). Since then, he may have learned to open himself up to the Backrooms’ shifting, amorphous logic, aiding his survival and ‘enlightenment’ inside. 

‘Tables Don’t Bleed Blood’: The Difference Between the Still Lifes & Cap’n Clark

“Tables don’t bleed blood” is the strangest, most ominous phrase scrawled on the mural, and it only makes sense once you get to the creepy dinner scene. In that scene, where Clark has taken Mary hostage and forced her to enact the fateful night his marriage fell apart, he reveals some of the strange physiology of the human-like entities known as ‘Still Lifes’. This includes them being impervious to harm and appearing to be filled, like dolls, with a white, gooey substance akin to cladding. 

Because of this, plus their warped appearances and inability to communicate or follow basic instructions, there’s a strong implication that the Backrooms struggles to differentiate between organic and inorganic life when ‘remembering’ people and objects. That means a Still Life is physiologically no different from a chair or table. The phrase ‘Tables don’t bleed blood’ could be Clark figuring out that the Still Lifes aren’t alive in any way that we’d recognise.

It could also point to another interesting discovery we make later. During the climactic encounter between Mary and Pirate Clark on the furniture store floor, she breaks the entity’s wooden leg, causing it to cry out in pain. Then, she uses the cement mould of a handprint she’s kept with her from her childhood home to batter its face in, causing its blood to spray all over her. 

This is weirdly incongruent with what Clark demonstrated about the other Still Lifes’ make-up. Knowing this, “Tables don’t bleed blood” could refer specifically to Pirate Clark, highlighting Clark’s realisation that his Backrooms copy is far more flesh-and-blood than any other, which explains why he empathises with it rather than hide from or try to kill it. His symbiosis with his Backrooms’ self might be further evidenced by the arrow on the mural linking the drawing of Pirate Cark and the person in his clutches to the “Here and now is a two-way street” phrase.

The Window Is Both Real and Metaphorical

As previously mentioned, the window is used as the symbolic selling point of Mary’s practice, which Clark has latched onto. He may even view the door he created with tape to mark the Backrooms’ entrance as his inner window, and going through it, he’s been liberated from the things that were holding him back. That’s why he’s content to remain in the Backrooms.

The person in the mural with Pirate Clark can either be read as being lifted by him for devouring or escaping him. Either way, it ends up being eerily prophetic when the creature’s pursuit of Mary leads her to an exit: a trapdoor in the ceiling.

Angel Numbers and Manifesting: Clark’s ‘Unrealised’ Dreams

One of the mural’s most obscure details is different combinations of the numbers three, six and nine. Fans have pointed out that these are Angel Numbers, a numerological theory that celestial beings might be communicating with us through certain numerical combinations, usually in threes. In place of hard science, we’re often drawn to esoteric and mystical explanations to make sense of the nonsensical. It’s unclear where Clark got these numbers from, unless he’s an unspoken believer, but in his spiralling madness, he may believe something is trying to reach him. This celestial theory is compounded by the crude drawings of stars around the numbers.

Also in this area of the mural is a particularly evocative drawing of a city with an underground subdomain. In this subdomain is a person in a house surrounded by jabbering mouths, and written underneath in angry capital letters is the word “UNREALIZED.” It doesn’t take much head-scratching to interpret this as a childlike therapy drawing of how Clark feels he is squandering his potential, his architectural dreams out of reach while he’s trapped at home, stuck in the same arguments with his wife.

It’s only the Backrooms and its infinite potential for creation and distinction from real-world pressures that Clark feels like he can finally, truly be himself, unchanged and unjudged.

‘The Fire Commanded Your Birth’: Deliverance to a New Beginning

Right next to the drawing I just described of Clark’s ‘unrealised’ dreams is the phrase that is hardest to unpack. “The fire commanded your birth”, along with another word that’s impossible for me to read, is hard to connect to anything we see within the Backrooms over the film’s runtime.

The only link I can find to any real-world meaning is Biblical, specifically, Daniel 3:8-25, a story that references the concept of the ‘life flame’ within us all, as well as the idea of trial by fire. Clark may feel partially responsible for Kat and Bobby’s deaths, having been the one to bring them in there. His coping mechanism might be to rationalise his time in the Backrooms as a painful but necessary rebirth, which is what fire often represents to us through the idea of creation from destruction. In the Book of Daniel tale, three figures, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, are condemned to a furnace, but their sacrifice only proves their fealty to God. Therefore, the fire is their divine deliverance, not their violent demise. Bobby was dragged into something furnace-esque in the Backrooms’ basement, too… 

Other than a very creepy Christmas scene, there aren’t any explicit Biblical or mystical Easter eggs in Backrooms, nor does Clark ever appear to be a religious person, so this is a totally speculative interpretation. Again, if we go with the tried and true idea that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one, “the fire commanded your birth” could be a red herring – the random rantings of a man losing his mind. 

The Backrooms randomly spews out surreal, dreamlike junk from its visitors’ minds. In many ways, the mural is Clark’s Backrooms – some of it may be meaningful, some of it may be gibberish in the search for clarity. Trying to find the difference between the two is what will keep viewers poring over Parsons’ film for longer than a single, fleeting cinema visit.